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AN OCEAN TRAMP 



Books hy William McFee 
*** 

ALIENS 

AN OCEAN TRAMP 

CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER 

CASUALS OF THE SEA 

PORT SAID MISCELLANY 



An Ocean Tramp 

By 

William McFee 




Garden City, N, Y., and Toronto 

Doubleday, Page & Company 

I 9 2 I 






COPYRIGHT, 192 1, BY 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 

INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 



MAY 23 1921 
0)CI.A614468 



TO 

A R 

" She was lovable, and he loved her. But he 
was not lovable, and she did not love him." 

— Heine's Reisebilder 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

In the original preface to the First Edition, it will be 
seen that by a perfectly justifiable stroke of artistic 
manipulation, the writer of the letters, the Ocean 
Tramp himself, is drowned at sea. Neither author 
nor publisher had offered any guarantee that the 
book was a record of cold facts, and it was not deemed 
necessary at that time to disillusion any of the public 
who saw fit to send in condolences upon the tragic 
end of a promising career. Nevertheless, the book 
was faithful enough in a larger sense, for the young 
man who wrote it had undoubtedly died and buried 
himself in its pages. His place, it appeared presently, 
was taken by a cynical person who voyaged all over 
the seven seas in various steamers, accumulating im- 
mense stocks of local colour, passing through the 
divers experiences which befall sailor-men, reading a 
good many books, and gradually assuming the role 
of an amused spectator. Of this person, however, 
there is no need to speak just now, and we must go 
back to the time when the author, in that condition 
known to the cloth as "out of a ship," arrived in 
London, the following pages tied up in a piece of 



viii PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

bunting, in his dunnage, and took a small suite of 
chambers over the ancient gate of Cliffords Inn. 
Now it would be easy enough, and the temptation is 
great, to convey the impression that the writer had 
arrived in the Metropolis to make his name and win 
fame and fortune with his manuscript. So runs the 
tale in many a novel issued during the last twenty- 
five years. It is time, therefore, to invent something 
new. The penniless law-student who writes a best 
seller and wins the love of a celebrated actress must 
make way for a sea-going engineer with a year's 
wages and a volume of essays in his pocket, and who 
had not succeeded in winning the love of anybody. 
Indeed the singular moderation of the demands of 
this young man will be appreciated by any one who 
has been afflicted with ambition, for he has never at 
anytime desired either to write a play, edit a magazine, 
or marry a prima-donna. At the particular juncture 
when he took over the little suite of furnished cham- 
bers from a young newspaper man who had received 
a sudden invitation to visit a rich uncle, his principal 
preoccupation was to pass his examination for his 
certificate of competency as a first-class engineer. 
To this end he began a mysterious existence possible 
only to the skilled Londoner. For the benefit of 
those who are not skilled Londoners, the following 
description may evoke interest. 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION ix 

In the morning on waking, he saw, through the 
small bowed window which looked out into the Inn, 
the sunlight shining upon the gilded gothic roof of 
the Rolls Building and possibly touching the tops of 
the trees of the grimy enclosure. Stepping through 
into the front room he could lean out of a mullioned 
affair below which he could read the date carved in 
the stone — 1472 — and looking up a long narrow court 
he could watch the morning traffic of the Strand 
passing the farther end like the film of a cinemato- 
graph. Down below, a gentleman who sold studs, 
shoe-laces, and dying pigs on the curb, and who kept 
his stock in a cupboard under the arch, was preparing 
to start out for the day. A dying pig, it may be 
mentioned, was a toy much in demand among stock- 
broking clerks and other frivolous young gentlemen 
in the City, and consisted of a bladder shaped like 
a pig whose snout contained a whistle which gave 
out on deflation an almost human note of anguish. 
Should the hour be before eight, which was probable 
since the author had contracted the habit, at sea, 
of rising at four, he would be further exhilarated by 
seeing his landlord, Mr. Honeyball, in a tightly but- 
toned frock-coat and wide-awake hat, march with an 
erect and milita'ry air to the end of the passage, dart 
a piercing glance in either direction, and remain, 
hands behind back and shoulders squared, taking the 



X PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

air. Which meant that Mrs. Honeyball was engaged 
in the dark and dungeon-Hke kitchen below the worn 
flags of the archway, preparing the coffee and bacon 
for Mr. Honeyball's breakfast. 

Having washed and shaved — and here it may be 
set down, for the benefit of Americans and others not 
skilled in metropolitan existence, that when a build- 
ing bears over its archway the date 1472 the bathing 
arrangements within will not be of the most modern 
design — the author then took his pipe, tobacco, and 
cane and prepared to descend the winding stone stair- 
way which ended in a door of heavy wood. This 
contrivance opened directly -upon the small triangular 
chamber where Mrs. Honeyball each day laid the 
meals for herself and husband, transacted her rent- 
collecting, and received occasional visitors during 
late afternoon, self-efFacing ladies of mature age who 
seemed to shrink back into the panelling behind 
them and who assumed the anxious immobility of 
figures in high relief, if the phrase may be allowed to 
pass. At this early hour, however, no one is in sight 
save Mrs. Honeyball herself, a slight elderly person 
with that look of pink beatification on her face which 
accompanies some forms of Christianity, emerging 
from another door which leads down a curved stair- 
way to subterranean regions. Mrs. Honeyball, it 
may be stated in parenthesis, is of the great family of 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xi 

hero-worshippers, women who are inspired with an 
indomitable and quite illogical faith in the wisdom 
and strength of their gentlemen friends. The mere 
fact of the author being a nautical character is suffi- 
cient for Mrs. Honeyball. Beyond going as far as 
Margate on the Clacton Belle, a fat, squab-shaped side- 
wheel aff"air very popular with London folk in that 
era, Mrs. Honeyball's acquaintance with the sea is 
purely theoretical. To her all seafaring men are 
courageous, simple-hearted stalwarts having their 
business in great waters, and she has intimated that 
she always remembers them in her prayers. The 
modest breakfast, for two,' is spread on one side of the 
round table which is so much too large for the room. 
She would be only too pleased if she could board me, 
but it is not allowed. The Inn, I have been given to 
understand, has been bought outright by some person 
of great wealth, whose design is to pull it down and 
erect a block of apartments. Mrs. Honeyball is 
somewhat afraid of this person. She gets in a great 
flutter, about the twentieth of the month, over her 
accounts. Just now, however, she is placidly benevo- 
lent and hopes that author has slept well. He has 
and says so, and opening the outer door, an immense 
portal of heavy wood studded with big black nails, 
he steps down into the archway, where Mr. Honeyball 
is encountered. Mr. Honeyball has been in the 



xii PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

army, has retired on a sergeant-major's pension after 
twenty-three years service' and he salutes the author 
in correct mihtary fashion. 

These amenities concluded and watches compared 
with the great clock of the Law Courts visible from 
the end of the passage, the author turned westward 
and set off briskly toward Charing Cross, buying a 
paper on the way, and noting from time to time the 
attractively attired young ladies who were hurrying 
to their various employments. At the risk of evoking 
a certain conventional incredulity in the readers' 
bosom, the author is constrained to point out that he 
harboured only the purest and most abstract senti- 
ments towards these young women. There is a period 
in the life of the literary artist, unhappily not perma- 
nent, when the surface of his mind may be described 
as absorbent of emotional influences, a period which 
results in the accumulation of vast quantities of data 
concerning women without to any degree destroying 
the authentic simplicity of his heart. And when the 
point of saturation is reached, to use an engineer's 
phrase, the artist, still preserving his own innocence, 
begins to produce. And this, one may remark in 
passing, is the happiest time of his life! He com- 
bines the felicity of youth, the wisdom of age, and the 
unencumbered vitality of manhood. He knows, 
even while in love, as he frequently is at such periods, 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xiii 

that there are loftier peaks beyond, mountain-ranges 
of emotion up which some day he is destined to travel, 
and he disregards the pathetic seductions of those 
who would bid him settle in their quiet valleys. 

Arriving in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, 
the author takes an affectionate glimpse into Trafal- 
gar Square, and turns down a steep, narrow street, 
leading towards the River, where is situated a small 
eating house. At that time, it should be observed, 
almost the only way for a stranger to obtain a break- 
fast in London was to go to a hotel and engage a room. 
Even at railroad terminals, where the refreshment- 
rooms were just beginning to be swept and garnished, 
and the waitresses were yawning behind the big 
urns, they did not regard the famished traveller with 
any enthusiasm. It was felt that a stranger wanting 
food at that hour had been up to no good. The 
author, being a skilled Londoner, was put to no such 
inconvenience. It was his habit, at intervals, to write 
special articles for the London papers, articles which 
had to be delivered to the night commissionaire on 
duty in the office of the newspaper. The particular 
functionary employed by the News was a social being 
and fond of port, and over a dock-glass at Finches, 
the celebrated bar in Fleet Street, had recommended 
a certain chop-house where night-birds ate before 
retiring to their nests in distant suburbs. To this 



xiv PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

hostelry the author therefore repairs, down the narrow 
dechvity, in at the door whose brass handles are being 
vigorously polished by a youth in a green baize apron, 
and upstairs to a long low chamber furnished with 
small tables. Here one discovers some half-dozen 
strays from the millions of Londoners who breakfast 
in orthodox fashion — in the secrecy and sullen silence 
of their own homes. And the salient feature of the 
people in this upstairs room is the inexorable isolation 
of their souls. No one speaks. One or two look up 
from their food as the author makes his way to the 
window from which he commands a glimpse of blue 
sky, the elevation of an enormous brick wall, and 
possibly a locomotive having its firebox cleaned on a 
siding and panting as though afflicted with lung trou- 
ble. He takes his seat not far from a young woman 
who is breakfasting on a bun and a glass of milk. 
She is reading a book, a fat novel in fine print, the 
covers soiled with food and the corners grimy with 
years of friction. She is there every morning eating 
a bun and drinking a glass of milk. She has a clear, 
delicate face, blonde hair, and large black eyes. Her 
hands are fine, too, though they might be better kept. 
One suspects she does her own washing after she gets 
home at night. 

The reader may possibly wonder why the author 
should lower himself in the esteem of men by dilating 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xv 

upon the appearance of a stray young woman whom 
fate had washed up on the shores of time near him and 
whom the next wave would inevitably bear away 
again. But the reader must exercise a little patience. 
Several women appear in this preface, and the author 
imagines they may reveal to the reader something of 
the mentality which wrote this book. A mentality 
somewhat alien to the English, since it was pro- 
foundly interested in women without incurring any 
suspicion of French naughtiness, or endeavouring in 
any way to make itself pleasing to them. A men- 
tality hampered by an almost hysterical shyness 
which, however, was capable of swift and complete 
evaporation in certain circumstances. 

So far, let it be premised, the shyness was still in 
evidence, and the author became as silent and austere 
as the other members of the company. There was a 
youth, in trousers obviously pressed under his mat- 
tress, and a coat too short for him, whose air of shabby 
smartness brought tears to the eyes of the author, 
who had passed through very much the same purga- 
tory years before. Indeed it was very much like a 
coffee room in purgatory, if the reader can imagine 
such a thing, for every one of the patrons had this 
distinguishing trait — they were shackled and tortured 
and seared by the lack of a little money. The mangy 
old waif who asked for a cup of tea and furtively 



xvi PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

fished out of a little black oil-cloth bag a couple of 
thick sandwiches; the middle-aged person with a fine 
moustache, frock-coat, and silk-hat, who ordered 
coffee and bacon and eggs, and forgot to eat while his 
tired eyes fixed themselves with insane intensity upon 
a mineral-water advertisement on the opposite wall; 
the foreign lady (whom the author hastens to record 
as a virtuous matron) whose bizarre hat and brightly 
painted cheeks were stowed away in an obscure and 
lonely corner where she pored over a Greek news- 
paper; the middle-aged gentleman whose marbled 
note-book was filled with incredibly fine writing and 
columns of figures which ought to have meant some- 
thing substantial, but which were probably only Hsts 
of bad debts utterly uncollectable — all these poor 
people would have been carried up to heaven had 
they suddenly discovered under their plates a twenty- 
pound note. And the desire to do this thing, to play 
the rich uncle for once, was at times so keen that the 
author felt himself in purgatory, too, in a way, and 
lost his appetite thinking about it. 

The reader may opine that such a meal would be 
but a poor preliminary for a morning of study, but the 
fact remains that the contemplation of misery stimu- 
lates one's mental perceptions. Once more out in 
the Strand, having watched the young woman de- 
scend the narrow street and fling a swift glance over 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xvii 

her shoulder as she turned into Northumberland Ave- 
nue, the author mounted a Barking 'bus and settled 
himself in the front seat, a gay httle Union Jack 
fluttering just above his head, and gave himself up 
unreservedly to reflections evoked by a return, after 
some years at sea, to his native air. Every foot of 
the way eastward brought up memories long dormant 
beneath the swarms of alien impressions received 
since going to sea, impressions that ranged from the 
songs of an octaroon in a blind-tiger back of Ogle- 
thorpe Avenue in Savannah, to the mellow Booni- 
cling-clang of temple-bells heard in the flawless dawn 
from a verandah above the sampan-cluttered canals 
of Osaka. Between his nostrils and the ancient 
odours of creosote blocks and of river mud drying 
at low tide came the heavy scent of Arab quarters, 
the reek of Argentine slaughter-houses and the subtle 
pervasions of Singapore. Since he had read with 
careless neglect the famihar names over familiar 
shops where he and his father had dealt in the com- 
mon things of life, his eyes had ached with the 
glittering hieroglyphics of Chinatown and the in- 
comprehensible futilities of Armenian and Cyrillic 
announcements. So it came about that he regarded 
ithe cheerful, homely, and sun-lit Strand with extraor- 
dinary delight, a delight enhanced by the incorri- 
gible conviction that in a few weeks he would quit it 



xviii PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

once more for distant shores. Yet the charm, evanes- 
cent as it was, laid an authentic hand upon his pulse 
and made it beat more quickly. Here he had bought 
his first dress-suit. The tailor's shop was gone 
and a restaurant with bulging glass windows thrust 
out a portly stomach into the street. Here again 
he had lunched in days gone by on Saturdays, 
and loitered far into the afternoon to flirt with the 
waitress. Here, where Wellington Street plunged 
across and flung itself upon Waterloo Bridge, one 
beheld staggering changes. The mountainous motor 
bus put on speed and scampered past the churches 
left like rocky islets in the midst of a swift river of 
traffic. Once past Temple Bar and in the narrow 
defile of Fleet Street the author's thoughts darted 
up Fetter Lane and hovered around a grimy building 
where he had pursued his studies with the relentless 
fanaticism of youthful ambition. There, under the 
lamp-post at the corner, one keen evening in early 
spring, he had what was for him a tremendous emo- 
tional experience. In the German class (for he was 
all for Wilhelm Meister, Faust, The Robbers, and Dich- 
tung und Wahrheit in those days) was a German girl 
learning Enghsh, a robust, vital, brown-haired wench 
from Stuttgart. Often when it came to his turn to 
read from the set piece of literature, he felt this girl's 
eyes upon him and he would raise his own to find her 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xix 

regarding him with a steady, appraising glance. And 
yet she seemed to vanish effectively enough in the 
general confusion of departure. Once she picked 
up his pencil and asked mutely for the use of it, and 
he assented with what he knew was a fiery blush. 
She replaced it with a firm nod of the head and her 
steady glance. For a few days the thought of her 
bothered his dreams and then, in the fanatical pursuit 
of knowledge, the mood evaporated. Perhaps she 
was aware of this and laid her plans accordingly, for 
on the last evening of the session, as he came down 
the steps of the college and turned toward Fetter 
Lane, he saw her standing under the lamp-post at 
the corner. A frightful predicament! It was one 
thing to read about Johann Wolfgang Goethe and his 
free emotional development, about Arthur Schopen- 
hauer living in Venice with his mistress and writing 
philosophical works, or to approve the newly trans- 
lated vapourings of Frederick Nietzsche. It was 
•quite another to walk steadily onward and encounter 
-a robust, vital, brown-haired wench from Stuttgart 
who stood waiting with unmistakable invitation in 
her pose. When he arrived at the corner he was in a 
'condition bordering on blind panic and he heard, 
as through a thick wall, a hoarse, musical voice mur- 
mur unintelligible words. He heard himself murmur 
something which brought a look of angry astonish- 



XX PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

ment into her eyes. He heard the words "Don't you 
Hke me?" far off, drowned by a buzzing of the blood 
in his ear-drums. And then a vicious thrust forward 
of the blonde head, a show of big white teeth, and the 
contemptuous phrase "Nassty you are!" as she flung 
round and hurried down the street. 

No doubt she was right. Often, in the night- 
watches at sea, the author has recalled the vitality of 
her appeal, the genuine frankness of her character, 
and wished for an opportunity to express his regret 
for his gaucherie and offer adequate amends. And 
as the 'bus lumbers along towards Ludgate Hill he 
thinks of her and wonders precisely what purpose 
these fugitive and fortuitous encounters serve. These 
futile yet fascinating conjectures bring him past 
Saint Paul's, in whose shadow he has spent many 
hours reading old books at the stalls in Holywell 
Street, and the 'bus races along Cannon Street, is 
brought up almost on its hind wheels at the Mansion 
House Corner, and the author gets a brief glimpse of 
Princes Street and Moorgate Street, where he was 
once "something in the City" as we used to say, 
before the policeman's hand is lowered and the east- 
bound traffic roars along Threadneedle Street and so 
down to Aldgate, where the author descends by the 
famous Pump, to begin the serious business of the 
day. For it must not be forgotten that this daily 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xxi 

*bus-ride from Charing Cross to Aldgate Pump is not 
prosecuted in a spirit of sentimental reverie. The 
author is going to school. Across the road may be 
seen a building athwart whose topmost window runs 
a tarnished gold sign Teague's School of Engineering, 
only all three ns of the last word are missing, which 
seems in keeping with the name Teague somehow, 
and gives the whole affair a touch of Irish dissipation. 
Nothing, however, could be more misleading. Up- 
stairs, four flights, the last two uncarpeted or 
linoleumed, one discovers only an austere establish- 
ment from which both Teague and his possible dissi- 
pation are long since departed. The business is now 
owned by a dapper young man of pleasing exterior 
and almost uncanny technical omniscience, who for 
a lump inclusive fee undertakes to pull the most 
illiterate of seafarers through the narrowportals of the 
government examination. He gives that impression 
as he sits at his desk in his private office, the cuffs of 
his grey frock-coat and his starched white shirt drawn 
up out of the way. He has the capable air of a 
surgeon, the swift, impersonal competence of an ex- 
perienced accoucheur. His business is to get results. 
It is not too much to say that he gets them. 

In the room beyond, however, in which the author 
takes his seat in the humble capacity of student, 
there is the curiously strained atmosphere that is to 



xxii PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

be found in all companies of disparate personalities 
intent upon a common end. Seated in rows at a 
number of pine desks are a score of men whose ages 
range from twenty-three to forty-five. Some are 
smoking. Others, with tongue protruding slightly 
from the corner of the mouth, and head on one side, 
are slowly and painfully copying the drawing of a 
pump or a valve-box. Others, again, are in the murky 
depths of vast arithmetical solutions extracting, with 
heavy breathings, the cube root from some formidable 
quantity, and bringing it to the surface exhausted and 
far from certain as to the ultimate utility of their 
discoveries. They have come from the far ends of 
the sea-lanes, these men, from Niger River ports and 
the coast towns of China, from lordly hners and 
humble tramps, from the frozen fjords of Alborg and 
the crowded tideways of the Hooghley. They are 
extraordinarily unprepossessing, most of them, for 
the time was not yet when sea-going was considered, 
save as a last resource, like selling newspapers or going 
to America. These men were mostly artisans, thick- 
fingered mechanics who had gone to sea, driven by 
some obscure urge or prosaic economic necessity, 
and the sea had changed them, as it changes every- 
thing, fashioning in them a blunt work-a-day fatalism 
and a strong, coarse-fibred character admirably 
adapted to their way of life. But that way is far 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xxiii 

from schools and colleges. They lack that subtle 
academical atmosphere so essential to genuine cul- 
ture. They have none of them what the educated 
classes call an examination brain. They resemble a 
pack of sheep-dogs in a parlour. They accept with 
pathetic fidelity the dogmas of their text-books, and 
they submit humbly to incarceration while their 
heads are loaded down with formulas and theories, 
most of which they jettison with relief when they feel 
the first faint lift of the vessel to the ocean swell out- 
side the breakwater. 

But it should on no account be assumed from the 
above truthful estimate of their mentality that these 
men are to be dismissed as mere factory hands or 
negligible land-failures. The sea has her own way of 
making men, and informs them, as the years and miles 
go by, with a species of differential intuition, a flexible 
mental mechanism which calibrates and registers with 
astonishing accuracy and speed. They become pro- 
found judges of human character within the rough 
walls of their experience, and for women they betray 
a highly specialized esteem. 

For all that, as they sit here in their extremely 
respectable blue serge suits, which still show the 
sharp creases where they were laid away in unskillful 
folds during the voyage, they give one an impression 
of lugubrious failure. It must be confessed that 



xxiv PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

simple as the examinations are they are beyond the 
range of many of us. The habits of study are not 
easily retained during the long stretches of watch- 
keeping intermitted with hilarious trips ashore. We 
find a great difficulty in keeping our minds on the 
problems set down. Outside is a blue sky, the roar 
of traffic at the confluence of four great thorough- 
fares, and the call of London, a very siren among 
cities, when one knows! Over yonder, a cigarette in 
his mouth, his head on his hand and his elbow asprawl 
on the desk, making idle marks with a pencil, is a 
youth who is nursing a grievance against the govern- 
ment. He has been up eight times and failed every 
time. He is going up again with us next Tuesday. 
Yet, as it has been whispered to me during lunch 
hour by my neighbour, a robust individual just home 
from Rangoon, he is a first-class man; just the chap 
in a break-down; always on the job; fine record. 
There is another, between us and the sectional model 
of a feed pump valve, who never looks up, but figures 
unceasingly with elbows close to his sides, his toes 
turned in, the nape of an obstinate, close-cropped 
neck glistening pale gold and pink in the morning sun. 
Without having been to sea with this party or even 
having seen his face, one is aware that he will always 
be found with his pale eyes wide open when the light 
is flicked on at One Bell. He has been sometime 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION^ xxv 

in tramp-steamers, who carry no oilers, for there is 
a hard callous on the knuckle of his right forefin- 
ger where the oil-feeder handle has been chafing. 
Whether he would be a tower of strength in a smash- 
up is not so easily divined. Next to him a young 
gentleman is sitting sideways smoking, a pair of 
handsome cufF-buttons of Indian design flashing at 
his wrists. He is, my neighbour has informed me 
during lunch, from the P. & O. and he corroborates 
this by asking a question of the lecturer concerning 
a broken valve-spindle of enormous dimensions. He 
stands for class in our community and gives a certain 
tone to the group who go up on Tuesday. Unhappily 
he falls out on the second day, owing to certain 
defects in his arithmetic, and disappears. No doubt 
he has gone to another sea-port to try a less austere 
examiner. 

And after lunch, the principal of Teague's School 
of Engineering suddenly emerges from his private 
office, hangs up a card labelled "No Smoking during 
'Lectures" and proceeds to feed us with the irredu- 
cible minimum of information necessary for our or- 
deal. By long practice, astute contriving, and careful 
cross-examination of successful pupils he has arrived 
at such a pass that he seems to know more about the 
examiner's mind than that gentleman himself. He 
repeats slowly and deliberately the exact form of 



xxvi PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

answer which is most hkely to draw approval from 
the grand inquisitor, and we copy it down hastily in 
our notes. The sleeves of his grey frock-coat are 
pulled back to keep the chalk dust from soihng them 
as he rapidly sketches on the board for our edifica- 
tion. We listen with respect, for we know he has 
been through precisely the same mill as ourselves, 
he has come on watch at midnight with his mouth 
dry and his eye-lids sagging and wishing in his heart 
he were dead. He has won out and now stands ready 
to show us the way. We listen to every word. The 
lecture is short, sharp, apposite, a model of all a 
lecture should be, stripped to the bare bones of fun- 
damental truth, pared clean of every redundant word. 
As the clock strikes three he claps his hands to rid 
them of chalk, pauses for a moment to answer perti- 
nent questions, and vanishes into his office once more. 

Most of us go home. 

The author now has an assignation with a lady, 
and the reader who has been patiently waiting for 
some sort of literary allusions in a preface to a volume 
of literary essays, is about to be gratified. The scene 
changes from the vulgar uproar of Aldgate to a flat 
in Chelsea. Hurrying through Houndsditch, across 
Leadenhall Street and up St. Mary Axe, the author 
discovers the right 'bus in Broad Street about to start. 
They are filling the radiator with water and the con- 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xxvii 

ductor is intoning a mysterious incantation which 
resolves itself into "^^-w^/ Oobun^ Benk! Piccadilly, 
'Yde Pazvk, Sloon Stree', Sloon Square, Kings Road, 
Chelsea an Walham Green. Here y ' are, lidy. " With 
long practice he can make the vowels reverberate 
above the roar of the traffic. The words Benk and 
Pawk come from his diaphragm in sullen booms. 
To hsten to him is a lesson in prosody. He enjoys 
doing it. He is an artist. He extracts the uttermost 
from his material, which is the mark of the supreme 
artist. He unbends when he comes up to collect the 
fares from the author and a lady who is probably re- 
turning to Turnham Green after a visit to her married 
daughter at Islington, and he leans over the author's 
shoulder to scan the racing news in the Stop Press 
Column, a courtesy as little likely to be withheld in 
London as a light for a cigarette in Alexandria. 
*'Hm!" he murmurs, stoically. "Jes' fancy! An' 
I had 'im backed for a place, too. That's the larst 
money I lose on that stable." He clatters down again 
and one hears his voice lifted once more as he rumbles: 
^^ Benk — Ooborn Benk!" with diaphragmatic in- 
tensity. 

To know London from the top of a 'bus is no doubt 

a liberal education, but it may be questioned whether 

f the tuition is as extensive and peculiar with a gasoline- 

, driven vehicle as with the old horse-hauled affairs 



xxviii PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

that took all day to jungle along from the North Pole 
Inn at Wormwood Scrubbs to the Mile End Road, 
or from the Angel at Islington to Roehampton. 
Almost before the author has digested a leading ar- 
ticle dealing with the Venezuelan Question the 'bus 
roars down Sloan Street, shoots across the Square, 
and draws up just where a few people are already 
collecting by the pit-doors of the Court Theatre for 
the evening performance of "Man and Superman." 
This being the end of a stage, if the pleasantry may 
be pardoned, the author descends and walks onward 
to his destination, which is a flat down by the 
River. 

There are certain thoroughfares in London which 
have always avoided any suspicion of respectable 
regularity either in their reputation or their archi- 
tecture. The dead monotony of Woburn or Eaton 
Square, for example, the massive austerity of the 
Cromwell Road, and the clifF-like cornices of Victoria 
Street, are the antithesis of the extraordinary variety 
to be found in Park Lane, High Street Kensington, 
Maida Vale and Cheyne Walk. This last reveals, 
between Blantyre and Tite streets, the whole social 
order of England and the most disconcerting divari- 
cations of design. In it meet democracy, plutocracy, 
and aristocracy, artist and artisan, trade and tradi- 
tion, philosophy and philistinism, publicans and 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xxix 

publicists, connoisseurs and confidence men, sin and 
sincerity. It is not proposed to introduce the reader 
to the whole of this goodly company. The Balzac 
of Chelsea still tarries in obscurity. By some amaz- 
ing oversight this street, which has sheltered more 
artists and authors than any other thoroughfare in 
i the world, seems to have evaded their capture. Chel- 
sea is a cosmos. Cheyne Walk is a world, a world 
abandoned by genius to the cheap purveyors of 
second-hand clap-trap and imitators of original minds. 

Let us go upstairs. 

Miss Flaherty is one of those women who appear 
from time to time in the newspaper world and who 
seem to embody in their own personalities the essen- 
tial differences between journalism and literature. 
Their equipment is trivial and their industry colossal. 
In a literary sense they are so prolific that they do 
not beget; they spawn. They present a marvellous 
combination of unquenchable enthusiasm and slov- 
enly inaccuracy. They needs must love the highest 
when they see it, but they are congenitally incapable 
of describing it correctly. Their conception of art 
consists of writing a book describing their own sexual 
impulses. This is frequently so ungrammatical and 
obscure that even publishers' readers balk at it, and 
it goes the rounds. In the meanwhile, they produce 
in incredible quantity of daily and weekly matter for 



XXX PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

the press. They wheedle commissions out of male 
editors by appealing to their sex, and write sprightly 
articles on Bachelor Girls and their Ideals, and the 
Economic Independence of the Married Woman. 
They become hysterically lachrymose, in print, over 
a romantic love affair, and relapse into sordid in- 
trigues on the sly. They demand political power 
without intending for a single moment to assume 
political responsibility. Their days are about equally 
divided between catching a husband and achieving 
what they describe as "a scoop." 

To all this Miss Flaherty adds an unusual faculty 
for spectacular antics. She has dressed in a red 
sweater and plied her trade, for a day, as a shoe-shine 
boy. She has dressed in a green cloak and sold sham- 
rock on St. Patrick's day. She has dressed in rags 
and sung in the streets for charity. She has hired 
a van and ridden about the suburbs pretending to 
sell domestic articles. She has attended revival 
meetings and thrown herself in a spasm of ecstasy 
upon what she calls the mercy-seat. She has . . . 

But the author is not absolutely sure whether she 
has . . . after all. He is of the opinion that, like 
most English women, she has no talent for that sort 
of thing. Like most young women who babble of 
emancipation she has an unsuspected aptitude for 
domesticity. She makes tea far better than she 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xxxi 

writes articles. She is, under a ridiculous assump- 
tion of slangy modernity, oppressively conventional. 
However, the author's immediate concern is not 
with Miss Flaherty's destiny at all, but with his 

I manuscript which she has been commissioned to place 
with a publisher. A writer of dime novels, on being 

I consulted as to the way to get a book published, said 
he didn't know, never having had a book to publish 
save in weekly serial numbers; and that, he hastened 
to observe, was quite another story. And then 
suddenly remarked, slapping his thigh and reaching 
for the makings of a fresh cigarette: "Why not try 
Imogene Flaherty .f* She's anxious to start in as 
author's agent." The author had no objections to 
raise beyond the fact that he disliked doing business 
with women and was afraid of anybody named Imo- 

H gene. The dime-novelist shook his head and said 
women in business and journalism had come to stay. 
And seriously, Miss Flaherty might easily be of im- 
mense assistance to the author. "Very nice girl, too 
— h-m — hm!" This reminiscently. "Very decent 
little woman. Go and see her — take my card — down 
in Cheyne Walk. She had a flat down there near 
Church Street. H-m. Yes." 

So it happened. And the result had been an ex- 
plosion. Miss Flaherty had accepted the commission 
and had read the manuscript and had, in common 



xxxii PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

parlance, gone up in the air. Her enthusiasm liter- 
ally knew no bounds. She did not actually foam at 
the mouth, but she displayed all the symptoms of 
advanced literary hysteria. Now there is this to be 
said for the sea — it may not furnish one with univer- 
sal judgments about women but it does provide 
the solitude and austere discipline which enable a 
man to coordinate his hitherto chaotic ideas about 
them. And women, if they only knew how they 
appear to the imagination of men on the rolling 
waters, would undoubtedly modify their own concep- 
tions of life, and possibly profit by the change, 
Imogene, however, had no such moment of illumina- 
tion. She lived in an enchanted world of imitation 
emotion and something in the author's manuscript 
had set her off, had appealed to her rudimentary no- 
tions of fine writing, and engendered a flame of en- 
thusiasm. It is not too much to say that she be- 
lieved in that manuscript much more than the author 
did. That is the correct attitude for a successful 
agent. Imogene did not "push" the book, as sales- 
men say, so much as herald it. She entered publish- 
ers' offices like a prophetess or one of the seraphim, 
panoplied in shining plumage, blinding the poor 
human eyes with beams of heavenly radiance, the 
marvellous manuscript, like a roll of lost gospels, held 
out before her. She blew a blast on her trumpet 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xxxiii 

and the doors of the publishers' readers swung wide. 
No knowledge of Enghsh literature prevented her 
from uttering her solemn conviction that here was 
the greatest book since Geoffrey Chaucer laid down 
his pen. With intrepid resource she warned the 
hesitating publisher that he would have none save 
himself to blame if he missed this chance of immortal- 
izing his house, and eventually a publisher was dis- 
covered who was willing to issue the book at the 
author's expense. All this, let it be said with regret, 
did not bring a blush to the author's sea-tanned 
cheek. On the contrary, he cherished a secret appre- 
hension that Imogene had gone mad. 

The one fly in the ointment at this juncture was the 
author's unmannerly attitude towards publishers who 
issued books at the writer's expense. He went so 
far as to characterize them as crooks and declined to 
have anything to do with them. He had been writ- 
ing for a good many years of apprenticeship and had 
arrived at the conclusion that a man might get along 
in decent comfort all his life without publishing any- 
thing at all, if fate so ordered it; and the suggestion 
that he pay away his hoarded sea-wages just to have 
his name on a book, clouded a naturally sunny tem- 
per for some time. 

, Here, however, sitting at tea in the intensely artis- 
itic flat on the third floor over a grocery-store, and 



xxxiv PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

looking out upon the River and the warehouses of 
the Surrey Side, the author is rapturously apprised 
that the book is as good as sold. A publisher's 
reader, a representative of an irriportant house, has 
declared that the book has distinction. This is a 
true record, in the main, and the author is obliged to 
confess, thirteen years later, that he fell for this. 
In his simplicity he thought it a fine thing to have 
distinction. And this is true. It is a fine thing, 
but the fineness of the bloom is soon licked off by 
the busy tongues of the Imogenes and their masculine 
counterparts. The author did not see this so clearly 
at the time. He felt as a cat feels when stroked. 
The patrons of distinction were also in a position to 
make a cash offer for the copyright. In those days, 
when fifty dollars a month was considered adequate 
remuneration for his services at sea, the author had 
modest notions about cash offers. He treated the 
matter in a sporting spirit and closed. 

But it was not consummated in a word and with 
the gesture of signing one's name. Things are not 
done that way when dealing with Imogenes. One 
has to negotiate a continent of emotional hill-climbing 
and an ocean of talk. A sea-faring person, schooled 
to deal with men and things with an economy of 
effort, is moved to amazement before the spectacle 
of a "bachelor girl" in action. One assumes, of 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xxxv 

course, that she intends to remain a "bachelor girl." 
There is the solemn initiation into the ranks of her 
pals. Palship, as she calls it, is something quite 
different from friendship, and to a man of normal in- 
stincts this is an alarming proposition. It is cer- 
tainly far more exhausting than an intrigue and far 
less interesting than a rationally controlled friendship 
with a person of the same sex. And here it is perti- 
nent to put forward what the author conceives to be 
the fundamental trouble with the Imogenes of both 
sides of the Atlantic. It is pertinent because he was, 
at the time of writing this book, under the influence 
of a very potent and inspiring friendship for a man 
now dead, a friendship which moulded his ideas and 
inspired him to hammer out for himself a characteris- 
tic philosophy of life. And one of the most important 
determinations of that philosophy deals with the 
common errors concerning friendship and love. The 
mistake of the bachelor girl and her prototypes lies 
in their failure to recognize the principle of sex as 
juniversal. It is not so much that men and women 
:annot meet without the problem of sex arising 
oetween them as that no two human beings can have 
my interchange of thoughts at all without involving 
?ach other in a complex of which masculine and femi- 
line are the opposite poles. The most fascinating 
)f all friendships are those in which the protagonists 



xxxvi PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

alternate, each one, owing to freshly revealed depths 
or shallows in his character, assuming the masculine 
or feminine role. The Latin recognises this by in- 
stinct. Just as his nouns are always either masculine 
or feminine, so are his ideas. And his women, who 
have never heard of "bachelor girls" or "palship," 
have achieved with consummate skill all and more 
than the Imogenes have ever imagined. Any one 
who has ever enjoyed the friendship of such women 
will recall that subtle aroma of sex which informs the 
whole affair. The coarse-grained northerner is prone 
to attribute the abundant vitality, the exquisite 
graces of body and mind to a deftly concealed vam- 
pirism or sensuality. Nothing is further from the 
truth. If you can play up to it, if your emotions and 
instincts are under the control of a traditional and 
finely tempered will, a notable experience is yours. 
Friendship, in fact, is the divinity whose name must 
not be uttered or he will vanish. She will not in- 
form you, as Imogene does, that you are not in love 
with her and she is not in love with you and therefore 
a palship is under way. On the contrary, she will 
never let you forget that love is a possibility always 
just out of sight, where it will always remain. She is 
economically independent because men cannot do 
without her. She has more rights than the Imogenes 
will gain in a thousand years; and she is, moreover, 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xxxvii 

something that men would strive to preserve in a 
world-cataclysm, whereas no one would give Imogene 
a single panic thought. 

Imogene, however, has no inkling of this. She is 
under the impression that she is one of the world's 
cosmic forces. In the rag-bag of her brain whence 
she fishes out the innumerable formless and gaudy- 
coloured pilferings from which she fashions her 
"special articles," she cherishes an extraordinary 
illusion that she is a sort of modern Hypatia. She 
says Aspasia, but that is only because she has con- 
fused Kingsley's heroine with Pericles' mistress. 
She talks of " mating with an affinity " of " influencing 
the lives of the men who do things." She is very 
worried about the men who do things. It is a proof 
of her conventional and Victorian mentality that she 
imagines men who do things are inspired to do them 
by women; whereas it is rather the other way round, 
I the men who do things having to avoid the majority 
P of women as they would cholera morbus, if they are 

ever to get anything done. 
r Springing up on the impulse of this thought the 
' author makes his excuses to the assembled guests and 
descends the dark stairway to the street. To tell the 
truth, these glimpses into the society of literary folk 
\ do not inspire in his bosom any frantic anxiety to 
' abandon his own way of life. He had a furtive and 



xxxviii PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

foolish notion that these people are of no importance 
whatever. These coteries, these at-homes, and flat 
philosophies are not the real thing. It sounds un- 
social and unconventional, no doubt, but it is a ques- 
tion so far unsettled in the author's mind whether 
any genuine artist loves his fellows well enough to 
co-habit with them on a literary basis. For some 
mysterious reason the real men, the original living 
forces in literature, do not frequent the salons of the 
Imogenes. They are more likely to be found in the 
private bars of taverns in the King's Road, or walking 
along lonely roads in Essex and Surrey. Indeed, 
they may be preoccupied with problems quite foreign 
to the immediate business of literary conversation. 
They may be building bridges, or sailing ships, or 
governing principalities. They are unrecognised for 
the most part. The fact is they are romantic, and 
it is the hall-mark of the true romantic to do what 
other men dream of, and say nothing about it. 

The motives of the author, however, in deserting 
the flat in Chelsea, were not entirely due to dreams of 
lofty achievement, but to the stern necessity to read 
voraciouslyon the subject of Heatfor hisexamination. 
And one of the dominating changes which he dis- 
covers in himself after the passage of thirteen years 
is a sad falling off" in brain-power. He is no longer 
able to read voraciously on the subject of Heat and 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xxxix 

Heat-engines. His technical library remains packed 
with grim neatness in his cabin book-case. When 
his juniors bring problems involving a quadratic 
equation he is stricken with a horrible fear lest the 
answer won't come out. He looks through his old 
examination papers and echoes Swift's melancholy 
sigh "Gad! What a genius I had when I wrote all 
that!" Most professional men, one is bound to 
suppose, become aware at periods of the gradual 
ossification of their intellects. And it is not always 
easy to retain a full consciousness of the compensat- 
ing advantages of seniority in the face of this positive 
degeneration. One begins to watch carefully for 
errors where one used to go pounding to a finish with 
a full-blooded rush. One has a feeling of being over- 
taken; the young people of the next decade can be 
heard not far behind, and they seem to be offensively 
successful in business, in friendship, and in love. One 
has ceased to be interesting to the women of thirty 
and the men of forty. The achievement of years 
shrinks to depressing dimensions, and the real test is 
on. One becomes uncomfortably aware of the shrewd 
poke of Degas that "any one can have talent at 
twenty-five. The great thing is to have talent at 
forty." 

The reader is invited to assume, therefore, that 
J the author, at twenty-five, was sufficiently talented 



xl PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

and ambitious to read voraciously on Heat and a 
great many other subjects. That he did so he calls 
on Mrs. Honeyball to witness, since that lady was 
really concerned for his health and urged him not to 
work too hard "for fear of a break-down." There 
was never any danger of a break-down, however. 
London was outside that window with 1472 carved 
below it, and at the first warning of fatigue the author 
would take hat and stick and fare forth in search of 
recreation and adventure. He would apologize to 
Mrs. Honeyball and her friends gathered in the little 
room below, where they were discussing what Mr. 
Honeyball described as "Christian Work." Mr. 
Honeyball used to bring out this phrase with extraor- 
dinary vigour and emphasis, as though the very 
enunciation were a blow to the designs of Satan. 
The author heard, during a later voyage, that the 
Honeyballs did eventually give up the mundane job 
of supervising apartments and retired to a quiet sea- 
side town where they devoted themselves entirely to 
"Christian Work." 

It was on one of these evening strolls that the 
author became on speaking terms with the girl who 
ate a bun and a glass of milk for breakfast every morn- 
ing. It is very easy to get acquainted with a virtuous 
girl in England — so easy that the foreigner is fre- 
quently bewildered or inclined to be suspicious of the 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xli 

virtue. It is a facility difficult to reconcile with our 
heavily advertised frigidity, our disconcerting habit 
of addressing a stranger as though some invisible third 
person (an enemy) just behind him were the object of 
our dignified disapproval. It may be explained by 
the fact that, from the middle classes downward, and 
excluding the swarms of immigrants in the large cities, 
we are a very old race, with a comprehensive knowl- 
edge of our own mentalities. One finds blond, blue- 
eyed Saxon children in East Anglia, and there are 
black-haired, brown-skinned people in the West 
Country who have had no foreign admixture to their 
Phoenician blood since the Norman Conquest. This 
makes for a certain solidarity of sentiment and a 
corresponding freedom of intercourse. 

Not that Mabel would understand any of this if 
she heard it. She has a robust and coarse-textured 
mind curiously contrasted with her pale, delicate 
features and sombre black eyes. She was one of 
those people who seem suddenly to transmute them- 
selves into totally different beings the moment one 
speaks to them. As the author did one evening, 
after peering absently through the window of a candy- 
store down near the railroad arch below Charing 
Cross, and seeing her sitting pensive behind the 
stacks of merchandise. She was very glad to see a 
familiar face and recognised the claim of the break- 



xlii PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

fast-hour with a tolerant smile and a cheerful nod. 
It is very easy, while talking to Mabel, to understand 
why there is no native opera in England, and a very 
powerful native literature. Opera can only prosper 
where the emotional strain between the sexes is so 
heavy that it must be relieved by song and gesture. 
We have nothing of that in England. Women, more 
even than men, distrust themselves and eschew the 
outward trappings of romance. But this makes for 
character, so that our friends and relatives appear to 
us like the men and women in novels. Mabel was 
like that. She walked in and out of half a dozen 
books which the author had recently read. And her 
importance in this preface lies in the illumination she 
shed upon this same subject of literature. The author 
at that time, as will be seen in the following pages, 
was addicted to fine writing and he held the view 
that literature was for the cultured and made no 
direct appeal to the masses. Mabel unconsciously 
showed that this was a mistaken view. Mabel was 
as chock full of literature as a Russian novel. She 
had adventures everywhere. The author coming 
in and talking to her, after breakfasting in the same 
coffee-room, was an adventure. It would make a 
story, she observed with naive candour. Only the 
other night, she remarked, a strange gentleman 
game, a foreigner of some sort, and asked for choco- 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xliii 

lates. A very entertaining gentleman with a bag, 
which he asked her to keep. No fear, she observed; 
no bombs or things in her shop — take it to the cloak- 
room in the station. Well, he must have done so, 
for they got it out of there after his arrest. Here 
was his photograph in the Sunday paper. Millions of 
francs he'd stole. Like a novel, wasn't it? The 
author said it was, very, and begged for more. He 
said she ought to write them down. Mabel looked 
grave at this and said she had a fellow . 
splendid education he had had. Was in the Pruden- 
tial. Her voice grew low and hesitating. He was 
going to give it up! Give up the Prudential.^ But 
that was a job for life, wasn't \0. Ah, but he had it 
in him. ... It appeared that he had won five 
pounds for a story. It was wonderful the way he 
wrote them off. In his spare time. And poetry. 
He was really a poet, but poetry didn't pay, the 
author was given to understand. So he wrote stories. 
Some people made thousands a year. 

This was all very well from Mabel's point of view, 

but the author did not want to go into the vexed ques- 

. tion of royalties. He wanted, on the contrary, to 

|j know Mabel's feelings towards the coming Maupas- 

iSant of North London. Did she love him? Or rather, 

to put the matter in another way, did he love her? 

Was he permitted that supreme privilege? Well, 



xliv PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

they had been going round together, on and off, this 
nine months now. As for being engaged ... he 
only got two pound a week as yet, remember. Yes, 
that was why she wanted him to go in for this writing 
and make a hit. She'd take it on and make ends 
meet somehow, if he did that. She could help him. 
He said she had some good ideas, only they wanted 
working out. And here was a secret — he'd written 
a play! Mabel leaned over the candy jars and whis- 
pered this dreadful thing in the author's ear. A 
friend of theirs had seen it — he was at one of the 
theatres in the electrical department and knew all 
the stars — and he said it was very good but needed 
what he called pulling together! If only a reliable 
person in the play-writing line could be found to do 
this pulHng together, there might be a fortune in it. 
The reader may be disturbed at Mabel's insistence 
upon the financial possibilities of literature, but in 
this she was only a child of her time. The point 
worthy of note is not her rapacity but the dexterity 
with which she utilized literature to further her 
ambition. She was identifying herself with literature 
and so fortifying her position. She was really far 
better fitted to be the wife of a fictionist than Imo- 
gene. And she could appreciate poetry addressed 
to herself. The author eventually saw some of it 
for a moment, written on sermon paper, but the 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xlv 

stanzas shall remain forever vibrating in his own 
bosom. She is memorable to the author, moreover, 
in that she brought home to him for the first time 
the starthng fact that every such woman is, in a sense, 
an adventuress. She never knows what will happen 
next. She is in the grip of incalculable forces. She 
has to work with feverish haste to make herself secure 
and to use even such bizarre instruments as literature 
in the pursuit of safety. Back in his tiny chambers 
over the old Gate of Cliffords Inn, the author medi- 
tated darkly upon that play that only required 
"pulling together" to make it the nucleus of a for- 
tune. Evidently, he reflected, there were determined 
characters about, aided and inspired by equally de- 
termined young women, battering upon the gates of 
Fame, and he felt his own chances of success against 
such rivals were frail indeed. So he went to sea 
again. 

Here, in one short sentence, is the gist of this book, 
that the sea is a way of escape from the intolerable 
burden of life. A cynic once described it as having 
all the advantages of suicide without any of its in- 
conveniences. To the author it was more than that. 
It was the means of finding himself in the world, a 
medium in which he could work out the dreams 
which beset him and which were the basis of future 
writings. But ever at the back of the mind will there 



xlvi PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

be the craving to get out beyond the bar, to see the 
hard, bright ghtter of impersonal land-Hghts die 
suddenly in the fresh gusts, and to leave behind the 
importunate demands of business, of friendship, and 
of love. 

"From too much love of living 
From hope and fear set free." 

The words hummed in his brain as he ascended the 
stone stairs of the gaunt building in Mark Lane to 
face the final ordeal of a viva voce examination before 
the Head Examiner. There had been a hurried con- 
sultation in whispers in the great examination room. 
In a far corner was a glazed, portioned-off space where 
sat the regular examiner with a perspiring candidate 
in front of him, tongue-tied and weary. And there 
were a dozen more waiting. So the author was in- 
formed in a whisper that he had better step upstairs 
and the Head Examiner would deal with him. And 
settle his hash quickly enough, thought the author 
as he sprang nimbly up behind the assistant examiner. 
He found himself in a large, imposing office where at 
an immense desk sat a man with a trim beard, rapidly 
scanning a mass of papers. The author immediately 
became absorbed in the contemplation of this per- 
son, for he bore an extraordinary resemblance to 
George Meredith. The head in profile was like a 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xlvii 

Sicilian antique, with the clear-cut candour of a 
cameo. Memories of Lord Ormont and His Aminta 
crowded upon the waiting victim and he found him- 
self almost hysterical with curiosity as to what would 
happen if he claimed to be a distant connection of 
Sir Willoughby Patterne, but without the historic leg. 
What if he led the conversation gently towards Rich- 
ard Feverel's perfect love-story, or alluded to a lady 
with whom he will always remain in love — Diana of 
the Crossways ? But nothing of the sort happened. 
The author was nodded curtly to a seat, the assistant 
examiner chose another chair close by, cleared his 
throat, shot his cuffs, and pulled up the knees of his 
trousers. The Head Examiner, without looking up 
or desisting from his rapid writing, began to express 
his deep regret that the author apparently preferred 
to work an evaporator under a pressure instead of a 
vacuum. There might possibly be some reason for 
this which he, the Examiner, had overlooked, and he 
would appreciate it if the author could so far unbend 
as to outline his experience in this business. Where- 
upon the Head Examiner proceeded with his writing 
and left the author, in a state of coma, facing an 
expectant assistant examiner, who resembled some 
predatory bird only waiting for life to be extinct be- 
fore falHng upon the victim. Somewhat to his own 
surprise, however, the victim showed signs of return- 



xlviii PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

ing animation, and began to utter strange, semi- 
articulate noises. The Head Examiner wrote on 
with increasing speed; the assistant examiner, some- 
what disappointed, still preserved an expectant air. 
The victim became more active, and astounded him- 
self by carrying the war into the enemy's camp. He 
announced himself as an adherent of the pressure 
method. He became eloquent, describing his tribu- 
lations working an evaporator on a vacuum. But 
the aim of examiners apparently is not to hear what 
one knows but to reveal to a shocked world what 
one does not know. The subject was immediately 
changed to the advantages of multi-polar generators 
and the ethics of the single-wire system. The as- 
sistant examiner reluctantly resigned any thoughts 
of an immediate banquet upon the author's remains 
and assumed an attitude of charitable tolerance, 
much as one watches an insect's valorous struggles 
to get out of the molasses. The Head Examiner 
from time to time interjected a short, sharp question, 
like a lancet into the discussion, but without looking 
up or ceasing to write with extreme rapidity. And 
as time went on and the whole range of knowledge 
was gone over in the attempt to destroy him, the 
author began to wonder whether these men thought 
he had, like Lord Bacon, taken all knowledge for his 
province, whether tramp steamers carried a crew of 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION xlix 

technical pundits, and whether there would be so 
many literary men and women about if they had to 
go through this sort of thing. And the thought of 
literature brought back George Meredith to mind 
again, only to be dismissed. It was much more like 
being examined by Anthony Trollope or Arnold Ben- 
nett, the author decided, than by Meredith. Ap- 
pearances are misleading. The thin, classical face 
never roused from its down-cast repose and implaca- 
ble attention. But at long last the assistant examiner 
shuffled his papers and remained silent for a mo- 
ment, as though regretfully admitting that the vic- 
tim was, within bounds, omniscient, and could not 
be decently tortured any longer. As an after thought, 
however, and glancing at the Head Examiner as 
he did so, he enquired whether the author had experi- 
enced any break-downs, accidents, smashes. . . . 
The author had. It was a subject upon which 
he was an authority, having served in a ship twenty- 
five years old with rotten boilers and perishing frames. 
j, And all unwittingly he became reminiscent and 
\ drifted into the story of a gale in the Bristol Channel 
L with the empty ship rolling till she showed her bilge 
i(. keels, the propeller with its boss awash thrashing the 
ij. sea with lunatic rage, and then the three of us swaying 
■\ and sweating on the boiler-tops, a broken main- 
iL steam pipe lying under our feet. And it had to be 



1 PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION 

done, for the tide and the current were taking us up 
to Lundy, where half-tide rocks would soon cook our 
goose, as the saying is. And as he grew absorbed in 
the tale the author observed out of the corner of his 
eye that the Head Examiner's pen paused and then 
was gently laid down, a new expression of alertness, 
as though about to deliver judgment, came over the 
finely cut features. And presently, as it was ex- 
plained how an iron collar was made and clamped 
about the broken pipe, and long bolts made to pass 
into the solid flanges of the valve below, to haul the 
pipe into its socket and hold it there by main force 
until we could get in, the Head Examiner turned in 
his chair, and nodded as he touched his beard lightly 
with one finger. It was about four in the morning 
when the job was finished, the author recalled, and 
he came up on to the wet deck, with low clouds flying 
past and Lundy an ominous shadow behind, while 
the dawn lifted beyond the Welsh Mountains and the 
jolly, homely lights of Swansea shone clear ahead. 
And as he paused and remarked that the repair proved 
to be eflPective, he saw something else in the face of 
the man watching him, something not seen before, 
something not very easy to describe. But it may be 
said to have marked another step in his career. Call 
it character, and the perception of it. Something, 
as the reader will see, that is only emerging in the 



PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION li 

pages of this book. Something harsh and strong- 
fibred, nurtured upon coarse food and the inexorable 
discipHne of the sea. Something that is the enemy of 
sloth and lies and the soft languors of love. Indeed, 
what the author has finally to say after all may be 
comprised in this — that out of his experience, which 
has been to a certain degree varied, he has come to 
the conviction that this same character, the achieve- 
ment and acceptance of it, stands out as the one de- 
sirable and indispensable thing in the world, and 
neither fame nor wealth nor love can furnish any 
adequate substitute for it. 

S. S. Turrialha, August, 1920. 

William McFee. 



PREFACE* 

As I sit, this hot July day, by my window on the 
Walk, while the two streams, of traffic and of Thames, 
drift past me, I think of the man who was my friend, 
the man who loved this scene so well. 

And he is dead. In my hand, as I write, lie his 
last written words, a hasty scribble ere the steamer 
left port on her voyage across the Atlantic. He is 
busy, as is evident by the greasy thumb-mark on the 
corner. He sat down in the midst of his work to 
send a last line to his friend. There is the inevitable 
joke at the expense of "his friend the Mate," that 
individual being in a towering passion with a certain 
pig which had escaped from his enclosure. This 
same pig, he declares, is some previous First Officer, 
who had been smitten by Circe for incontinence, and 
now wanders even from his sty! But I cannot go on 
in this way, for he is dead, poor lad, and I shall not 
see him again. 

To those men who have wedded early I can never 
hope to explain the deep-rootedness of such a friend- 
ship as ours. It was, to me, as though my own youth 

*Preface to the first edition. 

liii 



liv PREFACE 

were renewed in more perfect design. Never again 
shall I experience that exquisite deHght with which 
one sees a youth reach post after post along the ways 
of life and thought, reach out eagerly to field on field 
of knowledge, through which one has tramped or 
scampered so many years before. With something of 
wonder, too, was I inspired to see so young a man lead 
a life so perfectly balanced, so exquisitely sensitive 
to every fine masculine influence. Possessing to an 
unusual degree that rare temperament which we call 
culture, he entered joyously into all that Hfe off'ered to 
him, impatient only of hypocrisy and what he called 
"the copiously pious." Many misunderstood this 
phase of his character, mistaking for coarseness what 
was really a very fine love of honesty in thinking. 

Of his antecedents I have often wished to know 
something, but it was his whim to treat personal de- 
tails in a very general way. He would maintain 
obstinately that he himself was the most interesting 
person he had ever met, because, he would add, 
he knew so little about himself! When pressed, he 
would say, "My forefathers ploughed the soil, my 
father ploughed the ocean, I myself am the full corn 
in the ear." As to his childhood, he rarely mentioned 
it save in a cynical manner, indicating indisputably 
enough that all had not gone well. 

**In the beginning," I heard him tell a religious 



PREFACE Iv 

person, "In the beginning my mother bore me. 
When I was a child I was wont to bore my mother. 
Now we bore each other." That this was primarily 
intended to shock our friend's devotional sensibilities 
I do not doubt, but I imagine it contained some small 
truth all the same. I think he rather shrank from 
personalities, resolutely refusing even to be photo- 
graphed, hating that process with an unexampled 
vehemence strange in one so modern and so versed in 
mechanical and chemical science. "I!" he would 
rage. "What have / done to merit portraiture? 
Have I builded a city, or painted a masterpiece, or 
served my country, or composed an ihad?" Again, 
"Better a single faulty human effort than the most 
perfect photograph ever developed." 

Scanty indeed, therefore, did I find the materials 
with which to fashion an introduction to this book. 
With the exception of one or two pertinent fragments 
among his manuscripts, fragments more valuable 
to a critic than a biographer, I was unrewarded. 
One thing, however, was impressed upon me by my 
search. Here, at any rate, was a man developed to 
the full. Here was a man whose culture was deep and 
broad, whose body was inured to toil, whose hands 
and brains were employed in doing the world's work. 
I have read in books vehement denials of such a one's 
existence. He himself, in citing Ruskin, seemed to 



Ivi PREFACE 

be sceptical of any one man becoming a passionate 
thinker and a manual worker. But I have often 
heard him in close converse with some old shopmate, 
passing hour after hour in technical reminiscences 
and descriptions; then, upon the entrance of some 
artist or litterateur, plunge into the history of Letters 
or of Arts, never at a loss for authorities or original 
ideas, often even illuminating intellectual problems 
by some happy analogy with the problems of his trade, 
and rarely grounding on either the Scylla of over-, 
bearing conceit or the Charybdis of foohsh humility. 
I must insist on this fact at all events: he was not 
merely a clever young man of modern ideas. "Lon- 
don is paved and bastioned with clever young men," 
he would snarl. His aversion to the impossible type 
of cultured nonentities was almost too marked. His 
passion for thinking as an integral part of hfe placed 
him beyond these, among a rarer, different class of 
men, the lovers of solitude. It came to view in 
various ways, this fine quality of intellectual fibre. 
And, indeed, he — who had in him so much that drove 
him towards the fine Arts, yet could go out to earn his 
bread upon the waters, dwelling among those who had 
no glimmering of the things he cared for — was no 
slippered mouther of Pater and Sainte-Beuve but a 
strong spirit, confident in his own breadth of pinion, 
courageous to let Fate order his destiny. 



PREFACE Ivii 

Another outcome of my search for hght was a 
conviction of the importance of his theory of art. I 
might almost say his religion of art, inasmuch as he 
had no traffic with anything that was not spontane- 
ous, effervescing. To him a hammer and a chisel 
were actual and very real, and the plastic art appealed 
especially to him in its character o{ smiting. To smite 
from the stone, to finish with all a craftsman's cun- 
ning care — there seemed to him real joy in this; and 
so I think he felt the influence of art dynamically, 
maintaining always that the life-force is also the art- 
force, and remains constant throughout the ages. 
So, I imagine, he reasoned when he wrote the follow- 
ing verses, only to fling them aside to be forgotten: 

An Author, Sitting to a Sculptor, Speaks His Mind. 

And yet you call yourself a sculptor, sir? 

You with your tape a-trailing to and fro. 
Jotting down figures, frowning when I stir. 

Measuring me across the shoulders, so! 
And yet you are an artist, they aver, 

Heir to the crown of Michelangelo? 

I cannot think — eh, what? I ought to think? 

How will you have me? Shall I sit at ease. 
Staring at nothing thro' the eyelids' chink, 

Coining new words for old philosophies? 
Aye, so I sit until the pale stars wink 

And vanish ere the early morning breeze. 



Iviii PREFACE 

Sculpture is dead, I say! We have no men 
To match the mighty masters of the past: 

I've read, I've seen their works; the acumen 
Of Learning on their triumph I have cast. 

Divine! Colossal! Tongue nor pen 
Can tell their beauty, O Iconoclast! 

Ah, now you're modelling — in the soft clay! 

In that prosaic task where is the glow 
Of genius, as in great Lorenzo's day, 

When, solitary in his studio, 
Buonarotti, in his "terrible way," 

Smote swift and hard the marble, blow on blow? 

One moment while I ask you, earnestly, 

Where is the splendour of the Dorian gone, 
The genius of him whose mastery 

Outshines the classic grace of Sicyon, 

Whose art can show Death lock'd with Life, the cry. 

The shuddering moan of poor Laocoon ? 

The Sculptor continues to model swiftly while the sitter re- 
mains motionless, watching him. 

That's good, sir, good! I'll wait till you have done: 

We men of letters are a crabbed race; 
Often we're blind with staring at the sun; 

And when the evening stars begin their race, 
We miss their beauty, we, who creep and run 

Like beetles o'er a buried Greek god's face. 

I am reluctant to explain one of the main motifs 
of this young man's life as "an unfortunate love 



PREFACE lix 

affair." Indeed, apart from his frank avowal of the 
wandering fever in his blood, I am grown to believe 
that it was the very reverse of unfortunate for him. 
It brought him, as such things do, face to face with 
Realities, and showed him, sharply enough, that at 
a certain point in a man's life there is a Gate, guarded 
by the Fates, whose questions he must answer truth- 
fully, or turn sadly aside into the vague thickets of 
an aimless existence. And never did there live a 
youth more sincere in his thought. I know nothing 
more typical of him than his resolute refusal to sit 
for his portrait until he had done something memor- 
able. "What!" he would cry. "Why, the milk- 
man, who, I heard, has just had twins, is more worthy 
of that high honour than I. He has done something 
in the world!" 

And now he is dead, and doing and not doing are 
:i beyond his power. That the sea whereon he was 
[' born should bring him his death was fitting. Often 
i! he would urge his horror, not of death, but of Chris- 
tian burial. To be boxed up in the midst of mum- 
meries and lies — he would start up and pace the floor, 
the sweat standing on his face. Grimly enough. Fate 
took him at his word, flung him suddenly into eter- 
nity, the rushing of the wind his only requiem, the 
coastwise lights and the morning star the only 
watchers of his end. 



Ix PREFACE 

To the orthodox sentiment sudden death may 
seem a very horrible sort of end to a promising Hfe. 
But, as I sit by my window on the Walk, while the 
tides of Thames and traffic flow swiftly by, and the 
blue evening mist comes down over the river, trans- 
forming dingy wharf and factory into fairy palace 
and phantom battlement, it seems to me that my 
friend died fitly and well, in the midst of Realities, 
recking little that the love he thought secure had 
passed irrevocably from him, but never swerving in 
fidelity to his mistress or devotion to his friend. 

The air grows chilly, and night has fallen over the 
river. 

Chelsea. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 



This evening, as the Italian boatman rowed me 
across the harbour of Livorno, and the exquisite love- 
liness of the night enfolded me, I thought of you. 
It may be that the long curving line of lights which 
marked the Molo Nuovo reminded me of the Em- 
bankment by our windows, and so carried my mind 
on to him who waits for his V anderdecken to re- 
turn. Around me loomed the hulls of many steam- 
ers, their dark sides relieved by glowing port-holes, 
while across the water came the hoarse calls of 
the boatmen, the sound of oars, music, and the 
light laughter of women. Far down the harbour, 
near the Castello, a steamer's winches rattled and 
roared in irregular gusts of noise. By the Custom 
House a steam yacht, gleaming ghostly white in the 
darkness, lay at rest. And so, as the boat shpped 
through the buoys, and the molten silver dripped 
from the oars, I thought of you, my friend at home, 

3 



4 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

and of my promise that I would tell you of the life 
of men in a cargo-tramp. 

I propose, as I go on from sea to sea, to tell, in the 
simplest language in my power, of the life that is 
around me, of the men among whom I toil. I shall 
not tell you of these fair towns of the Southern Sea, 
for you have travelled in years gone by. I shall 
not prattle of the beauties of Nature, for the prattle is 
at your elbow in books. But I shall — nay, must, for 
it is my use and habit — tell you about myself and the 
things in my heart. I shall be, not a hero talking 
about men, but a man talking about heroes, as well 
as the astonishing beings who go down to the sea in 
ships, and have their business in great waters. 

To you, therefore, these occasional writings will be 
in somewise addressed. You are my friend, and I 
know you well. That alone is to me a mystic thread 
in the skein of my complex Hfe, a thread which may 
not be severed without peril. You, moreover, know 
me well, or perhaps better, inasmuch as I am but 
passing the periods of early manhood, while you are 
in the placid phases of an unencumbered middle-age. 
So, in speaking of the deep things of life, I may leave 
much to be taken for granted, as is fitting between 
friends. 

I offer no apology, moreover, for the form of these 
Letters from an Ocean Tramp. Even if I unwisely 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 5 

endeavoured to hide their literary character under a 
disguise of colloquiaHsms and familiar references to 
personal intimacies, I should fail, because, as I have 
just said, you know me well. In your private judg- 
ments, I believe, I am allocated among those who are 
destined to set the Thames on fire. In plainer words, 
you believe that I have an ambition. This is true, 
and so I make no attempt to conceal from you the 
ulterior design of these essays. Ere you have read 
one of them, you will perceive that I am writing a 
book. 

I shall take no umbrage at the failure of my com- 
munications to call forth repHes. I know you to be 
a bad correspondent, but a valuable friend. I know 
that your attitude toward a letter addressed to you 
is that of a mediaeval prince toward a recalcitrant 
prisoner — viz., get all the information possible out of 
him, and then commit him to the flames. Possibly, 
when I have attained to a deeper knowledge of the 
spirit of the Middle Ages, I shall also have discovered 
the motives for this curious survival of barbarism in 
your character. I can only hope humbly that these 
papers, armed with their avowed literary import, 
will not share the fate of the commoner envoys pass- 
ing through your hands, but will be treated as noble 
ambassadors rather than as hapless petitioners, not 
merely escaping the flames of oblivion, but receiving 



6 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

safe conduct, courteous audience, and honourable 
lodging. 

II 

I SUPPOSE we may say of everyone, that he sooner or 
later falls a victim to the desire to travel, with as 
much truth as we say, far more often, that he falls a 
victim to love. However that may be, I claim no 
special destiny when I say that I have been mastered 
by both passions, except perhaps that they culmi- 
nated in my case simultaneously. 

I must go back to the time when I was some six 
years old to find the first faint evidences of the rover 
in me. At that time we lived almost at the foot of 
that interminable thoroughfare, the Finsbury Park 
Road, next door to a childless dame whose sole com- 
panion was a pug of surpassing hideousness of aspect, 
and whose sole recreation was a morning stroll in 
Finsbury Park with this pug. How I came to form 
a third person in these walks I cannot quite remember 
but I can imagine. At the age of six I was a solemn 
child, unclean in habits, consorting with "grown- 
ups," and filled with an unsocial hatred for the baby 
whose matutinal ablutions were consummated at the 
same hour at which the old lady usually took her walk. 
I can remember that I was supposed to assist in 
some way at those ablutions, probably to hold the 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 7 

mottled soap, which curiously resembled the in- 
fant's limbs when pinched with cold; and so, I sup- 
pose, I would steal out and join the lady and her 
dog, walking a little to one side as we drifted slowly 
up the dull suburban street into the park. Some- 
times we went as far as the lake, and I have faint 
memories of a bun, purchased by the dame, and 
munched by me as we watched the gardeners trim- 
ming the beds. I do not wish to suggest that this 
lady was my first love — I have never carried my seno- 
phile proclivities to that extent. She was, to me, 
the antithesis of mottled soap and cradle-rocking, and 
as such she lives in my memory. I am also grateful 
to her for giving me my first glimpse of a world out- 
side the front door; an ugly world, it is true, a world 
of raucous bargaining and ill-bred enjoyment, but a 
world nevertheless. 

Why should I tell of so trivial an incident? Bear 
fwith me a moment. 

Since I have been at sea I have often reflected upon 
the fact that many phases of my life are even now 
going on, quite heedless of my absence, quite apathe- 
, tic of my very existence, in fact. How marvellous, 
j: it seems to me, to know that life at my old school is 
|. proceeding upon exactly the same lines as when I 
i was there! At this moment I can see, in imagina- 
jttion, the whole routine; and I can tell at any time 



8 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

what the school is doing. Again, I know precisely 
the goings-in and the comings-out of all the staff at 
my old employer's; picture to myself with ease what 
is happening at any instarit. More wonderful still, I 
know what my friend is doing at this moment. I 
know that he is seated in his room at the Institute, 
talking to our friends (perchance of me), ere they 
descend to their lectures at seven o'clock. At ten, 
while I am "turned in," he will be leaving the Insti- 
tute, and the 'bus will put him down at his favourite 
hostelry. At this moment he is smoking a cigarette! 
But then, of course, he is always smoking a cigarette! 

It is a far cry from a stealthy stroll with an old 
woman in Finsbury Park to a twenty-thousand-mile 
tramp in a freighter, and yet one is the logical outcome 
of the other, arrived at by unconscious yet inevitable 
steps. Listen again. 

At a later period, when I had discovered that tools 
were a necessary complement to my intellectual well- 
being, I brought my insatiable desire to make some- 
thing to the assistance of my equally insatiable desire 
to go somewhere. From a sugar-box and a pair of 
perambulator wheels I fashioned a cart, between the 
shafts of which I travelled many leagues into the wilds 
of Middlesex and Essex. "Leagues" must be under- 
stood in the sense in which Don Quixote would have 
used the word. I do not suppose I ever traversed 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 9 

more than eight or ten miles at a time. But never, 
while the desire to go out and see is living within me, 
shall I forget how, one breathless August day, when 
the air was heavy with the aroma of creosoted sleep- 
ers, my small brother and I stared through the gates 
of a level crossing, and saw Epping Forest in the blue 
distance! O phantoms of Cortes, Balboa, and De 
Soto, wert thou there? O Sir Francis, hadst thou 
that thrill when 

"Drake went down to the Horn, 
And England was crowned thereby "F 

But I grow magniloquent. My object is attained 
if I can but show that when my friend took me under 
his wing at the Institute long years agone, when the 
innocent-looking lad with the fair hair, that might 
have had an incipient tonsure superimposed without 
incongruity, drifted away from textbooks of me- 
chanics, and sat down with Schiller, Ducoudray, 
and Carlyle, he little imagined how adventurous a 
spirit there boiled under that demure disguise of re- 
tiring scholarship — a spirit fired with an untamable 
passion for looking over the back-garden wall! 

Even perambulator wheels give out, however. I 
forget whether the wheels of my Httle cart failed be- 
fore my mother's patience, or the reverse. I was 
growing away from those tiny journeys; my head 



lo AN OCEAN TRAMP 

bulged with loose heaps of intellectual rubbish ac- 
quired during long hours of unsociable communion 
with a box of books in the lumber room. I knew the 
date of Evil Merodach's accession to the Assyrian 
throne, but I did not know who killed Cock Robin. 
I knew more than Keats about the discovery of the 
Pacific, but I did not know Keats. I knew exactly 
how pig-iron was smelted, but I did not know the 
iron which enters into the soul. I knew how to differ- 
entiate between living and non-living matter, but I 
did not know that I was alive. Then a new heaven 
and a new hell opened before me; I was sent away to 
school. 

Concerning school and, after school, apprentice- 
ship, I shall not speak. Neither mind nor body can 
wander far in those humane penitentiaries called 
schools. I had fed myself with History since I had 
learned, painfully enough, to read, and here at school 
I found I knew nothing. What did it matter.? The 
joy of knowing the name of the wife of Darius, of 
Lucan, of Caesar, was mine alone. I wove stories 
about Roxana and Polla, but I doubt if any one ever 
wove stories about the Conventicle Act, or the 
Petition of Rights, or the Supremacy of the Pope, as 
told in a school history. I often wonder that boys 
do not grow up to hate their country, when they are 
gorgedwith the horrible trash in thoseyellowvolumes. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP ii 

I once read of a little boy who killed himself after 
reading "The Mighty Atom." I believe many 
people deplored this, and expressed aversion to the 
book in consequence. That is proper; but suppose 
the school history had related the story of "The Little 
Princes in the Tower" with the same power and in- 
tensity which Corelli employs in the "Atom," and 
suppose the little boy had been so overwhelmed with 
the horror and vividness of the historical perspective 
that he had hanged himself behind the fourth-form 
classroom door — well, then, I should say the remaind- 
er of the boys would have learned the reign of Richard 
the Third as it has never been learned before or since, 
and the unhappy suicide would not have died in vain. 
But, as I said, one cannot wander far at school. A 
ji schoolmaster once advised his colleagues to take up 
some literary hobby — essay writing, articles for the 
, press, etc. ; for, said he, teaching is a narrowing pro- 
|: fession. I wonder if any schoolmaster has ever 
; imagined how narrowing it is for the boys.? Have 
they never seen the look of abject boredom creep over 
the faces of even clever lads as the "lesson" drones 
on: "At this period the Gothic style of architecture 
arose, and was much used in Northern Europe for 
ecclesiastical buildings." And so on, including dates. 
Whose spirit would not fail.? Why not, oh, my mast- 
ers, why not use this inborn passion for wandering 



12 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

abroad of which I write? Why not take that jaded 
band of youths out across yon fields, take them to 
the village church, and show them grinning gargoyle 
and curling finial, show them the deep-cut blocks of 
stone, show them, on your return, a picture of the 
Rue de la Grosse Horloge at Rouen? Would your 
trade be narrowing then ? 

Ill 

But the sea! 

My friend asked me once, of the Mediterranean — 
Is it really blue? And I replied that I could give 
him no notion of the colour of it. And that is true. 
From the real "sea-green" of the shallow North Sea 
to the turquoise-blue of the Bay; from the grey-white 
rush of the Irish Sea to the clear-cut emerald of the 
Clyde Estuary; from the colourless, oily swell of the 
Equatorial Atlantic to the paraffin-hued rollers of the 
Tropic of Cancer, the sea varies as human nature it- 
self. To the artist, I imagine, no two square miles 
are ahke, no two sunsets, no two sunrises: 

"His sea in no showing the same, 
His sea, yet the same in all showing." 

As I climbed the steep side of the almost-empty 
steamer, lying at the Tyne-main Buoys, a keen, alert, 
bearded face looked over the gunwale above me. I 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 13 

stepped aboard and spoke to the owner of this face. 
I said, "Is the Chief aboard?" 

"He is not." 

"Is the Captain aboard?" 

"He is not." 

"Then who is aboard?" 

"The Mate's aboard." 

"Are you the Mate?" 

"I am that." 

"My name is McAlnwick. I am signing on with 
this steamer." 

"Ye 're welcome." And we shook hands. 

He is the very image of my old Headmaster, is this 
mate of the Benvenuto. The trim beard, the keen, 
blue, deep-set eyes, the smile — how often have I seen 
them from my vantage-point at the bottom of the 
Sixth Form! On his head is an old uniform cap 
with two gold bands and an obliterated badge. He 
wears a soiled mess-jacket with brass buttons in the 
breast-pocket of which I see the mouthpiece of a 
certain ivory-stemmed pipe. His hands are in his 
trouser pockets, and he turns from me to howl into 
the cavernous hold some directions to the cargo-men 
below. In the gathering gloom of a short January 
afternoon, with the rush and roar of the winches in 
my ears, I stumble aft to my quarters, thinking pleas- 
antly of my first acquaintance. 



14 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

And our friendship grows as we proceed. When 
we have sHpped out of the Tyne one grey evening, 
when the Hghts of Shields and Sunderland die away, 
we are friends. For, as I prophesied, my whiskey 
would open hearts. It was on a cold, bleak morning, 
ere we left Newcastle, that I heard a stealthy step 
down the stairs to my room, and a husky whisper — 
had I a nip o' whiskey? Yes, I had a nip. The 
bottle is opened, and I fill two glasses. Evidently 
the First Officer is no believer in dilution. With a 
hushed warning of "Ould Maun!" as a dull snoring 
comes through the partition, he tosses my whiskey 
"down his neck," rubs his stomach, and vanishes 
like — like a spirit! Later in the day, as I stare 
across at some huge ships-of-war (for we are op- 
posite Elswick now), I hear a voice, a hearty voice, 
at my elbow. 

"Thank ye. Mister McAlnwick, for the whiskey. 
'Twas good!" 

I express my pleasure at hearing this. He touches 
me on the shoulder. 

"Come down to me berth this evening," he says, 
"an' we'll have a nip.'' And I promise. 

Perhaps it is the sensation of drinking whiskey with 
my Headmaster's double, but I enjoy creeping down 
the companion-way to the Mate's room. And I, 
being of the true line of descent, with my father held 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 15 

in memory still, am welcome. I am taken into this 
old sea-dog's confidence, and we talk. I have learnt, 
I think, the delicate art of asking questions of the 
men who do the world's work. Perhaps because I 
have dwelt so long with them, because I love them 
truly, they tell me the deep things of their lives. 
And so you must picture me in the Mate's room, 
seated on his settee, while he loads my knees with 
photographs of his wife and children. This is Jack, 
son and heir, in his Boys' Brigade uniform. He has 
a flute, too, which he "plays beautiful, Mr. McAln- 
wick — beautiful!" Then there is Madge, a sweet 
little English maid of fourteen, with a violin: "Her 
mother to the life." "Dot" follows, with only her 
big six-year-old eyes looking out of curls which are 
golden. And the Baby on his mother's knee — but I 
cannot describe babies. To me they are not beauti- 
ful creatures. They always seem to me, in photo- 
graphs, to be stonily demanding why they have been 
born; and I, wretched man that I am, cannot answer 
them, for I do not know. Calypso, too, not "eter- 
nally aground on the Goodwin Sands of inconsola- 
bility," interests me, in that I also was mothered of 
a sea-wife. A hard life, I imagine, a hard life. I 
find no delight in the sea in these mariners. "A Life 
on the Ocean Wave" was not written by one who 
earned his bread from port to port. My friend the 



1 6 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

Mate (he has gone on watch now, so I may speak 
freely) lives for the future. He holds a master's 
ticket, yes; but commands do not come to all. He 
lives for the time when the insurance money falls in, 
when he will sit down in the little house in Penarth 
where the sun warms the creeper on the back- 
garden wall. He will keep chickens, and perhaps 
there will be a cucumber frame between the peas 
and the vegetable patch, and he will do a little 
gardening when the weather is fine, and smoke, and 
read the shipping news. "And there shall be no 
more sea." 

Not that I would give you to think that a Chief 
Officer's life is one of toil. Indeed, on a steamship, 
while at sea, he has little to do. His "watch" is a 
sinecure save in thick weather, and is usually occupied 
by day with sundry odd jobs, by night with thoughts 
of home. In port he is busy like everybody else; 
but at sea, in fine weather, his greatest grievance is 
the short hours "off" and "on." Our steamer carries 
but two deck officers, and these two keep alternate 
"watch and watch" throughout the twenty-four 
hours. This means that his watch below is all sleep. 
The Chief Officer comes off at eight p.m., say, washes 
himself, smokes a pipe, and "turns in." At eleven- 
forty-five the sailor coming on watch at the wheel 
calls him, and he "turns out." Nothing can equal 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 17 

the ghastly expression on the faces of men who have 
been torn from their sleep at an unnaturally prema- 
ture hour. They move along the iron decks Hke 
ghosts, peering into one's face like disembodied spirits 
seeking their corporeal correlatives, and avoiding 
stanchions, chains, and other pitfalls in an uncanny 
fashion. In the meantime, the Second Officer drifts 
"aft" to his bunk for another four-hour sleep. And 
so on, day after day, for weeks. 



IV 

I HAVE this, at any rate, to say of sea-life: a man is 
pre-eminently conscious of a Soul. I feel, remember- 
ing the blithe positivism of my early note, that I am 
here scarcely consistent. As I stood by the rail this 
morning at four o'clock — the icy fingers of the wind 
ruffled my hair so that the roots tingled deliciously, 
and a low, greenish cloud-bank, which was Ireland, 
lay nebulously against our port bow — I felt a change 
take place. It was almost physical, organic. The 
dawn grew whiter, and the rose-pink banners of the 
coming sun reached out across the grey wastes of the 
St. George's Channel. I am loth to use the trite 
metaphor of "a spiritual dawn." By a strange 
twist of things, my barest hint of a soul within me, 
that is to say, the faintest glimmer of the ever- 



1 8 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

increasing purpose of my being — the moment it 
showed through, the outer world, including my own 
self, had always greeted it with inextinguishable 
laughter. Perhaps because the purpose was always 
so very immature, so very uncertain, I wanted — I 
hardly knew what. My ideas of morality were so 
terrible that I left it alone, on one side, for a time, and 
charged full tilt at art. I shouted that I thought 
music a disease, and musicians crushed me. I did 
not mean that; but I could get no nearer to what I 
did mean in any other phrase. I told hard, practical 
business men that they were dreamers and vision- 
aries; and they are still dreaming. 

But the Angel of the Spirit does not move in any 
prescribed path, or make his visits to any time-table. 
I think I heard the far-off beating of his wings this 
morning, as we swept up-channel towards the Clyde, 
and I think I was promised deeper knowledge of Love 
and Life than heretofore. I know that with the dawn 
came a sense of infinite power and vision, as though 
the cool wind were the rushing music of the spheres, 
and the rosy cloudland the outer portals of the 
Kingdom of God. 

And, indeed, I have had my reward. I had come 
from Italy, where I had wandered through churches 
and galleries, and had seen the supreme excellence of 
a generation whose like we shall not see again, and as 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 19 

we came up that stately firth and discovered a gene- 
ration as supreme in their art as the Itahans of 
the sixteenth century were in theirs, I held my 
breath. 

From Greenock to Glasgow resounded the clangour 
of hammers and the thunder of mechanism. Plate 
by plate, rivet by rivet, and beam by beam, there 
grew before my very eyes the shapes of half a hundred 
ships. I see more clearly still, now, what I meant by 
insisting on the conservation of intellectual energy. 
My friend points piteously to past periods, and says, 
"They can't do it now, old man." And I smile and 
point to those steel steamships, growing in grace and 
beauty as I watch, and I say, "They couldn't do that 
then, old man!" Just as the physical energy in this 
universe is a definite totality, so is the intellectual or 
spiritual energy. The Da Vinci of to-day leaves his 
Last Supper undepicted; but he drives a Tube 
through the London clay. Cellini no longer casts a 
Perseus and alternates a murder with a Trattato; 
he builds engines and railroads and ships. Michael 
Angelo smites no sibyls from the living stone, but he 
has carved the face of the very earth to his design. 
And though no fair youth steps forth to paint the 
unearthly nimbus-light around the brows of his be- 
loved madonna, I count it fair exchange that from 
every reef and point of this our sea-girt isle there 



20 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

shines a radiance none can watch without a catching 
of the breath. 

V 

It is a far call from such musings to the Skipper, 
whom I encountered as I was in the midst of them. 
It is only the bald truth to say that I had not then 
considered him to be a human being. Even now I 
am uncertain how to describe him, for we do not 
meet often. He is a tall, powerfully built, slow- 
moving man, strong with the strength of those who 
live continually at sea. Something apart from tem- 
porary bias made me look distastefully upon his 
personality. I resolved to fasten it upon my dissect- 
ing board, and analyse it, relegating it if possible to 
its order, genus, and species. Let me try. 

A single glance at the specimen before us, gentle- 
men, tells us that we have to deal with a remarkable 
case of arrested development. Although inexpe- 
rienced observers might imagine traces of the British 
colonel, as found in Pall Mall, in the bristling white 
moustache, swollen neck, and red gills, we find neither 
public school education nor inefficiency much in evi- 
dence anywhere. On the contrary, education is in a 
rudimentary condition, though with slightly protu- 
berent mathematical and fictional glands. Ineffi- 
ciency, too, is quite absent, the organ having had but 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 21 

small opportunity to perform its functions. The 
subject, we may conclude, gentlemen, has been accus- 
tomed to a sort of mathematical progression and hav- 
ing to ascertain its whereabouts in the water by "tak- 
ing the sun." It has been fed chiefly on novels, food 
which requires no digestive organs. It has a horror 
of land generally, and should never be looked for "on 
the rocks." You observe this accumulation of yellow 
tissue round the heart. The subject is particularly 
fond of gold, which metal eventually strangles the 
heart and renders its action ineffective and unreliable. 

Longfellow, if I remember rightly, drew a very 
spirited comparison between the building and launch- 
ing of a ship and the building and launching of a state. 
The state, said he, is a ship. M-yes, in a poetical 
way. But no poetry is needed to say that a ship is a 
state. I maintain that it is the most perfect state 
yet conceived; and it is almost startling to think that 
so perfect an institution as a ship can be run success- 
fully without morality, without honesty, without 
religion, without even ceremonial — ^without, in fact, 
any of those props usually considered by Tories and 
Nonconformists to be so vital to the body-politic. 

For, observe, here on this ship we have some forty 
human beings, each of whom has certain clearly de- 
fined duties to perform, each of whom owes instant 
and absolute obedience to his superior officer; each of 



22 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

whom receives a definite amount of food, drink, 
tobacco, and sleep per day; each of whom is bound 
for a certain period to remain in the state, but is free 
to go or stay when that period terminates; each of 
whom is at hberty to be of any persuasion he please, 
of any political party he please, to be of any nation- 
ality he please, provided he speak the language of the 
state; each of whom is medically attended by the 
state; and, finally, each of whom can snap his fingers 
at every Utopia-monger since Plato, and call him a 
fool who makes paradises for other fools to dwell in. 
So, I say, the ship is a perfect state, its very perfec- 
tion being attested by the desire of its inhabitants 
to end their days elsewhere. 

Joking aside, though, I fear my notions of sailor- 
men have been sadly jarred since I began to study 
them. Writing with one eye on this master-mariner 
of ours, I call to mind certain conceptions of the sailor- 
man which my youthful mind gathered from books 
and relations. He was an honest, God-fearing man; 
slightly superstitious certainly, slightly forcible in his 
language at times, slightly garrulous when telling you 
about the Sarah Sands; but all these were as spots on 
the sun. He was just and upright towards all men, 
never dreamed of making money "on his own," and 
read prayers aloud on Sunday morning to the assem- 
bled seamen. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 23 

Humph! I own I cannot imagine this skipper 
reading anything aloud to his crew except the Riot 
Act, and hewould not get more than half-way through 
that if his cartridges were dry. There is a brutal, 
edge-of-civiUzation look in his cold blue eye which 
harmonizes ill with the Brixton address on the letters 
he sends to his wife. 

Ah, well! Sometimes, when I think of this man 
and his like, when I think of my puny attempts to 
creep into their skins, I must need laugh, lest, like 
Beaumarchais, I should weep. What, after all, do I 
know of him? What is there in my armoury to 
pierce this impenetrable outer-man? Once, when I 
was Browning-mad, I began an epic. Yes, I, an 
epic! I pictured the hordes of civilisation sweeping 
over an immense and beautiful mountain, crushing, 
destroying, manufacturing, and the burden of their 
cry was a scornful text of Ruskin's — "We do not 
come here to look at the mountain"; and they 
shouted, "Stand aside." And then, when the moun- 
tain lay blackened, and dead, and disembowelled, 
out of the hordes of slaves came a youth who would 
not work and thereby lose his soul; so he set out on a 
pilgrimage. And the burden of his song was "the 
hearts of men." 

"And the cry went up to the roofs again, 
Show me the way to the hearts of men." 



24 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

But, alas! by the time I had got back into blank 
verse again, he had fallen in love, and as far as I 
know he lived happy ever after. But I often think 
of his clear, boyish voice singing, ''Show me the way 
to the hearts of men." 

Gilbert Chesterton, whose genius I hope my friend 
will some day appreciate, once wrote a strange "crazy 
tale," in which he meets a madman who had stood in 
a field; and this seemingly silent pasture had pre- 
sented to his ears an unspeakable uproar. And he 
says, "I could hear the daisies grow!" Well, I have 
sometimes thought of that when in some roaring street 
of London. Could I but hear men and women think 
as they pass along! To what a tiny hum would the 
traffic fall when that titanic clangour met my ears! 
I imagine Walter Pater had this thought in mind 
when he says, so finely, of young Gaston de Latour: 
"He became aware, suddenly, of the great stream of 
human tears, falling always through the shadows of 
the world." 

How good that is! But, alas! So few read Pater. 
It is true men cannot possibly read everything. To 
quote another exquisite thinker, who I fear drops 
more and more into oblivion: "A man would die in 
the first cloisters" if he tried to read all the books of 
the world. But it is strange so few read those eight 
or nine volumes, so beautifully printed, which are 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 25 

Pater's legacy to us. How they would be repaid by 
the delicate dexterity of his art, the wonderful music 
of his style! But I digress. 

I have no doubt that many monarchs would envy 
the life of a steamship captain at sea. Indeed, his 
duties are non-existent, his responsibility enormous. 
He bears the same relation to his company that a 
Viceroy of India bears to the Home Government. 
So extended were his powers that he could take 
the steamer into a port, sell her cargo, sell the vessel 
herself, discharge her crew, and disappear for ever. 
It is a sad pill for us sentimentalists that those who 
live by and on the sea have less sentiment than any 
others. These masters are wholly intent on the 
things of which money is the exchange. They have 
never yet seen "the light that never was, on sea or 
land." Their utmost flight above "pickings" and 
"store commissions" is a morose evangelicalism, a 
sort of ill-breeding illumined by the smoky light of the 
Apocalypse. But they never relax their iron grasp 
on this world. Perhaps because they feel the super- 
nal tugging at them so persistently they hold the 
tighter to the tangible. They are ashamed, I think, 
to let any divinity show through. "And ye shall be 
as gods" was not uttered of them. The romance — 
that is the word! — the romance of their lives is never 
mirrored in their souls. And the reahsation of this 



26 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

has sometimes led me to imagine that — it was always 
so! I mean that there was nothing poetic to Hercu- 
les about the Augean task, when the pungent smell 
of ammonia filled his nostrils, and he bent a sweat- 
dewed face to that mighty scavenging once more: 
that there was nothing poetic to Caesar about the 
Rubicon: nothing poetic to Clive about India. The 
world seems to have an invincible prejudice against 
men who see the romance in the work they are doing. 
The footballing, cigarette-smoking clerk, who lives 
at Hornsey or Tufnell Park, works in an office in 
Queen Victoria Street, lunches at Lyons's, and plays 
football at Shepherd's Bush, sees no romance in his 
own life, which is in reality thrilling with adventure, 
but thinks Captain Kettle the hero of an ideal exist- 
ence. Captain Kettle, bringing coal from Dunston 
Staiths to Genoa, suffers day after day of boredom, 
and reads Marie Corelli and Hall Caine with a relish 
only equalled by the girl typewriters in the second- 
class carriages of the eight-fifteen up from Croydon 
or Hampstead Heath. These people cannot see the 
sunlight of romance shining on their own faces! I 
observe in myself a frantic resentment when I fail 
to convince the other officers that they are heroes. 
They regard such crazy notions as dangerous and 
scarcely decent. You can now perceive why religion 
occasionally gains such a hold upon these men. To 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 27 

be uplifted about work, or nature, or love, is deroga- 
tory to their dignity as bond-slaves of the industrial 
world; but in the realms of the infinite future, in the 
Kingdom of God, where "there shall be no more sea," 
their souls break away from the harbour-mud, and 
they put out on the illimitable ocean of belief. 



VI 

It is so long since I set my hand to paper that I am 
grown rusty! I did not write you from Madeira — 
that is true. One cannot write from Madeira when 
"Madeira" means a plunging vortex of coal-dust, a 
blazing sun, and the unending roar of the winches as 
they fish up ton after ton of coal. Moreover, I was 
boarded by a battalion of fleas from the Spanish la- 
bourers in my vicinity — fleas that had evidently been 
apprenticed to their trade, and had been allowed 
free scope for the development of their ubiquitous 
genius. I looked at the old rascal who tallied the 
bags with me, envisaged in parchment, and clothed in 
picturesque remnants, and heard his croaking "Cin- 
cuo saco, Senor," or "Cuarro saco, SenorJ' as he bade 
me note the varying numbers on the hook, and I 
wondered inwardly whether the Holy Ofl&ce had ex- 
perimented during the sixteenth century with Spanish 
fleas, and so brought them to such an astonishing 



28 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

perfection in the administration of slow torture. 
Breeding, I take it, holds good with fleas as with 
horses, dogs, etc. Those born of parents with thicker 
mail, longer springs, harder proboscis, and greater 
daring in initiative, would doubtless be selected and 
encouraged, if I may say so, to go farther. It is possi- 
ble that many famous recantations could be accounted 
for by this hypothesis. Galileo, for instance, proba- 
bly had a sensitive epidermis which afforded an un- 
limited field for the exploitation of Spanish fleas, 
which formed, according to my theory, an indispensa- 
ble item in the torture chest carried by the fraternity 
in Tuscany. Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, I 
imagine to have been a dark-skinned heretic, tanned 
by travel and hardship, and regarding the aphanip- 
terous insect with the sardonic contempt of one who 
had lived in England in the sixteenth century. His 
own gown probably contained . . 

I was roused from these musings by observing 
four bags come up on the hook, and hearing them 
saluted by my picturesque vis-d vis with ^'Cincuo saco, 
Senor!" I deserted my theory and hastened to point 
out the error of fact. He bowed his head in sub- 
mission with all the haughty grace of Old Castile. 
When out at sea once more, I looked back along his 
ancestral line; I saw him in the days of old, marching 
through Italy with the Great Emperor, taking part 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 29 

in some murderous deed that cried to the law for 
vengeance, flying from Spain in a tall galleon to still 
more desperate work upon the high seas, settling in 
these pleasant islands with bloody booty in pieces of 
eight, drifting down and down to an adobe hut, and 
an occasional job as sub-deputy assistant stevedore 
to a British coal factor. Then he faded from my 
sight, and the life of an ocean tramp closed round me 
once more, 

VII 

Sailcloth and coal-dust being our equivalent for 
sackcloth and ashes, the steamer looks mournful 
indeed as she drives southward towards the Cape. 
But with lower latitudes comes warmer weather, 
and a sea so unutterably smooth that one loses faith 
in the agony of the Bay or the Gulf of Lyons, while 
the hellish frenzy of the North Atlantic in winter is a 
I distemper of the brain. It is in such halcyon days 
that we begin to believe in paint. The decks are 
methodically chipped and scraped of their corroding 
rust, ventilators are washed and painted, and all the 
deck-houses are cleansed of a coating of coal-dust 
which seems appalling. As the days drone by the 
filth disappears; pots of red, white, brown, and black 
paint come out of the Mate's secret store in the 
"fore-peak," and one hears satirical approval from 



30 . AN OCEAN TRAMP 

those below. "Like a little yacht, she is," says one, 
and the Second Mate is asked if he has a R. Y. S. 
flag in the chart-room. I fear the wit who called the 
engine-room a whited sepulchre had some smack of 
truth in him. The Mate had given it an external 
coating of paint as white as the driven snow, and it 
needed no heaven-sent seer to perceive that within 
it was full of all uncleanness. But what would you? 
The engines do not run of themselves, though to say 
so is one of the navigator's few joys in a world of woe. 
The ship herself knows better, I think, though per- 
chance she is like us other mortals, and thinks her 
heart best unattended, and sees no connection be- 
tween the twenty-five tons of coal she eats per day 
and the tiny clink which the speed recorder gives 
every quarter of a mile on the poop. We below, at 
any rate, know all this, for therein is the justification 
of our existence. And so our decorations must needs 
wait till we reach port, when the holds are in travail 
and the winches scream out their agony to the bare 
brown hills beyond the town and mingle with the 
deep, dull roar of the surf on the barrier reef. 

And now let me describe my day at sea, as well as 
I am able. Different indeed from those I was wont 
to spend at home. No delicious hours in our pet 
hostelries; no Sundays with music and an open win- 
dow looking out upon the river; no rollicking even- 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 31 

ings in some dear old tumble-down studio; no mid- 
night rambles towards home down the Fulham Road, 
where the ghostly women walk; no cosy talks round 
the fire when the fog lies white against the glass, while 
the candle-light glows on the tall, warm rose-wood 
bookcase, and all is well with us. Nay, as eight-bells 
strikes ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting, and the 
hands of the clocks point to twelve midnight, I awake. 
Ten minutes before, George the Fourth, of whom I 
may tell more anon, switches on the light and punches 
me in the ribs. I turn over to sleep again, while 
he rummages in his berth for soap, towel, and clean 
shirt, and goes below. A gay, likeable lad is George 
the Fourth, with bonnie brown hair and steady blue 
eyes. 

Mechanically I rise at twelve, hustle on my 
"dungarees," and, sweat-rag in my teeth, I pass along 
the deck beneath the stars which dust the midnight 
dome. My friend the Mate is just ahead, as I vanish 
through a low-arched doorway which shows black 
against his white paint. Careful now; these stairs 
are steep, and the upward-rising air is like a gust of 
the "stormy blast of hell." Round the low-pressure 
cylinder, then down again — and we are "below." 

The steady beat and kick has become a thunderous 
uproar; by the yellow light of the electrics you can 
see the engines — my engines for the next four hour§. 



32 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

George is round by the pumps, stripped to the 
waist, washing. He has finished; on the black-board 
he has recorded his steam-pressure, his vacuum, 
his speed per minute, the temperature of his sea 
water, his discharge water, and feed water; but 
he cannot leave till I have thumbed all bearings, 
noted all water levels, tried the gauges, and see that 
bilges, pumps, thrust-block, tunnel-shaft, and stern- 
gland are all right. And while I do all this I try to 
make out the orchestration of the uproar as my friend 
would some tremendous Wagnerian clangour. Ah, 
what would he think of this, the very heart of things, 
if he were but here ^ 

Does George the Fourth feel the romance of it? 
Not a bit. George the Fourth was pitch-forked into 
a marine engineering shop at the ripe age of thirteen. 
He is twenty-two now, and carnal minded. He 
wants "siller" for — well, not for the Broomielaw. 
He wants to go "east" again to Singapore, where the 
ladies of Japan are so charming and so cheap. The 
only hope for him is that he may fall in love. I pray 
without ceasing that he may fall in love. See the 
young pagan lounging round by the stokehold door. 
Now you will perceive what I argued as to the heroic 
nature of their lives. 

"L.P. Top end is warm," I observe reproachfully. 

** 'Twas red-hot when it came to me," he exagger- 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 33 

ates genially, putting a clay "gun" in his mouth, 
and adding: 

"Chief says, clean Number Four smoke-boxes fore 
and aft yoore watch, an' ta trimmers to tak' nowt 
fra' th' thwart-ship boonkers." 

Then he swings away, climbing the stairs with one 
eye on the engine. A goodly youth, such as we ad- 
mire; a magnificent young animal with possibilities. 

And then the firemen. I stand under the venti- 
lator — it is cooler — and I watch them toil. Think 
well upon it, my friend. These were men doing this 
while you were at your German University, while 
you were travelling over Europe and storing your 
mind with the best of all times. They are doing it 
now, will do it while you are at your work at the 
Institute. They have their business in the great 
waters. That little man there, with two fingers of 
his left hand gone, is Joe, a Welshman from his be- 
loved Abertawe. Beyond him, again, the huge gaunt 
frame and battered deep-sea cap, the draggled mili- 
tary moustache surmounted by high cheek-bones, 
the long, thin, sinewy arms tattooed with French 
dancing-girls — where shall our knowledge of the 
nations place him.? That is Androwsky, from 
Novorossisk, in South Russia. A vast, silent man, 
uttering but three or four words a day. His story.? 
I cannot tell it, for he never speaks. In my poor 



34 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

way I have tried to get it in German, but it is no good. 
In the meantime he is almost the best fireman in the 
ship. Indeed, all my men are good. Scarcely ever 
do we have less than full steam at the end of the 
watch. 

And now, my engines! To the uninitiated it is, I 
suppose, a tiresome, bewildering uproar. And yet 
every component, every note of this great harmony, 
has a special meaning for the engineer; moreover, the 
smallest dissonance is detected at once, even though 
he be almost ready to doze. So finely attuned to 
the music does the ear become that the dropping of a 
hammer in the stoke-hold, the rattling of a chain on 
deck, the rocking of a barrel in the stores, makes one 
jump. It is the same with the eye. It is even the 
same with the hand. We can tell in an instant if a 
bearing has warmed ever so slightly beyond its legiti- 
mate temperature. And so it is difficult to know 
"who is the potter and who the pot." The man and 
the machine are inextricably associated, and their 
reflex actions, one upon the other, are infinite. It is 
this extraordinary intimacy, this ceaseless vigilance 
and proximity, that gives the marine engineer such 
a pull over all others where endurance and resource 
accompany responsibility. In all big power-stations 
you will find many men with long sea service in 
charge of the engines. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 35 

I remember arguing once with a matter-of-fact 
apprentice in the shop concerning the suburbs as 
suitable locaHties for such as he. He was not con- 
vinced. "There!" he said, slapping the shelf above 
his bench. "That's where I'd Hke ter sleep. All yer 
gotter do at six o'clock is roll off and turn to ! " Well, 
that is just what he would get at sea. In most 
steamers the engineer walks out of the mess-room, 
bathroom, or berth, into an alley-way on either side 
of the engine platform. The beat of the engines 
becomes part of his environment. He sleeps with it 
pulsing in his ears, so that if she slows or stops he 
opens his eyes. When I go up at four o'clock and 
call the Second Engineer, he will stretch, yawn, half 
open one eye, and mutter, "What's the steam?" 

To keep him awake I retail some piece of current 
engine gossip. "After-bilge pump jibbed at three 
o'clock," I say. "Aw ri' now?" he asks. "Yes, 
aw ri' now," I answer. "You'll have to watch the 
M.P. guide though — she's warm." Then, remarking 
that the after-well is dry, and that I've got plenty of 
water in the boilers for him, I leave him and go below 
till he relieves me. It is a point of honour among 
us to know every kink and crotchet of day-to-day 
working. If a joint starts "blowing" ever so little 
away up in some obscure corner of our kingdom, we 
know of it within an hour or two. One would think 



36 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

we were a mothers' meeting discussing our babies, 
to hear the grave tittle-tattle concerning the inevita- 
ble weakness of babies and engines which passes over 
the mess-room table. 

Now come with me along the tunnel, then, to the 
end of the world. A narrow, sliding water-tight 
door in the bulkhead here, under the shadow of the 
thrust-block — elegance in design, you will observe, 
being strictly subordinated to use. Follow carefully 
now, and leave that shaft alone. It will not help 
you at all if you slip. The music has died away, 
only a solemn clonk-clonk— clo?ik-cIonk reverberates 
through this narrow, Norman-arched catacomb. At 
length we emerge into a larger vaulted chamber, 
where the air is singularly fresh — but I forgot. I am 
not writing a smugglers' cave story. We are under 
an air-shaft running up to the poop-deck, and we may 
go no further. The fourteen-inch shaft disappears 
through a gland, and, just beyond that is the eighteen- 
foot propeller whirling in the blue ocean water. 
Here, for us, is the great First Cause. Of the illimit- 
able worlds of marine flora and fauna outside these 
riveted steel walls the sailor-man knows nothing and 
cares less. What are called "the wonders of the 
deep" have no part in the life of the greatest wonder 
of the deep — the seaman. 

And when the propeller drops away, as it does 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 37 

sometimes — drops ''down to the dark, to the utter dark, 
where the blind white sea-snakes are^' — there goes out 
from that ship all life, all motion. Even as the mass 
of metal plunges downward and as the frenzied en- 
gineer rushes through blinding steam and water to 
stop the engines in their panic rush, the spirit of the 
vessel goes out of her in a great sigh. With dampered 
ash-pits her fires blacken and go out, the idle steering- 
engine clanks and rattles as the useless rudder tugs 
at her chains, and the crew tell in whispers how it 
happened just like that on the Gipsy Queen, out of 
Sunderland, or the Gerard Dow, out of Antwerp. 
All of which is not to be learned in the study at 
home. Let us get back to the engine-room. 

I am curious to know how all this would strike my 
friend at home. Would it not, as Henley used to 
say, give him much to perpend .f' I hear him mutter 
that phrase we talked out once, at the tea-table — 
"The Age of Mechanism." But why not an Age of 
Heroism? Mind, I use this latter word in its true 
sense as I use the word Hero. For some occult rea- 
son, known only to Brixton and Peckham Rye, a hero 
is the person who jumps into the Thames and pulls a 
woman out, or the interesting inanity of a popular 
serial. There is nothing essentially heroic in life- 
saving. Indeed, all the old heroes of Norseland, 
Rome, and Greece regarded the saving of life with a 



38 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

contempt that was only natural when we consider 
the utter lack of board schools and their frantic behef 
in a hereafter. I imagine the Norse Sea-kings who 
pushed out to Vine-land — aye, even down to Cape 
Cod — ^would have been puzzled to hear an undersized 
clerk who had saved a man from a watery grave 
described as a hero. Their method was to pull the 
drowning wretch out with a boat-hook, and curse him 
for being so clumsy as to fall in. Eric the Red never 
worried about a sailor who had the bad judgment 
to be washed overside during the night. Hercules 
would have felt outraged had the Royal Humane 
Society of the period loaded him down with their 
medals. Achilles would as soon have thought of 
committing the interminable catalogue of the Grecian 
Ships to memory as of associating the saving of life 
with the heroic. I am not suggesting that these 
heroes are more worthy of emulation than a life-saver; i 
I only want to explain that there is, in our day, a race 
of beings, half-man, half-god, who correspond, in all 
broad characteristics, to those rather indecent heroes 
of early imaginative literature. They do with ease 
those deeds which would have appalled the mailed 
monsters of chivalry; they regard the other sex as 
being created solely for their use in port; they love life 
dearly, but they leave the saving of it, like the heroes 
of old, to the gods. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 39 

One has only to listen (in the galley) to their 
nonchalantly narrated tales of mystery and horror to 
realize the truth of that argument. A steady mono- 
tone is the key of their telling, their voices rising only 
to hammer home some particularly horrific detail. 
Sometimes, in the clangour of the engine-room, they 
will relate perilous misadventures at sea, or ludicrous 
entanglements in sunny southern ports. But they 
never waste breath in elaboration or "atmosphere." 
They leave that to the nervous listener. They know 
nothing of the artistic values of their virile tales. 
They do not know they are only carrying on the 
tradition of the men of all time since Homer, They 
fling you the fine gold of their own lives, and wallow 
in the tittle-tattle of lady-novelists and Reynolds's. 
They seethe with admiration for Captain Kettle's 
amazing manoeuvres, while the shipping offices are 
papered with lists of those who are too indolent or too 
forgetful to claim their service medals from the 
Government, 

VIII 

I REMEMBER, in the grey dawn one day last week, 
my relief sang in my ear as he wiped his hands after 
"feeling round," "Deutschland's astern, goin' like 
fury." "Sure.?" I asked. "Only boat with four 
funnels in the line," he said. Four funnels! I raced 



40 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

up and aft, and saw her. Some three miles astern 
going westward, going grandly. From each of her 
enormous funnels belched vast clouds of black smoke 
till she looked like some Yorkshire township afloat. 
Through glasses I could see the dome of the immense 
dining saloon, and the myriad port-holes in her wall- 
like side. I could see her moving fast, though so far 
away. As the head sea caught the massive bows, 
she never waited. Her 35,000 h.p. drove her crash- 
ing through them, and they broke high in air in j 
clouds of foam. Splendid! I thought. But my ; 
heart was with those "below." Think of the toil! i 
Six or seven hundred tons of coal per day is flung ! 
into her dozens of furnaces, against our twenty-five 1 
tons. Think of the twenty-odd engineers who j 
scarcely see their bunks from the Elbe to the Hudson. 
And, in that cool, grey, pearly dawn, think of those | 
passengers sleeping in their palatial state-rooms, ' 
with never a thought of the slaves who drive that I 
monstrous ship across the Atlantic at such an appall- 
ing speed. I say ''appalling" because I know. 
The smoking-room nuisance will say, "Pooh! My 
dear fellow, the Lusitania licks us clean with her 
twenty-five knots." He is coldly critical because he 
does not know. 

But I digress. 

Look around now. You observe we lose very 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 41 

little space in gangways. Even in front of the en- 
gines, where we are walking to and fro, the space is 
perilously narrow between the fly-wheel of the revers- 
ing engine and the lathe. Some thirty feet long, this 
engine-room, bulkhead to bulkhead, and, save for a 
recess or two extending to the ship's skin, penned in 
between bunkers. Twelve hundred tons of coal, 
distributed like a thick wall round us, make the place 
warm in the tropics. Forward, the stoke-holds, 
dimly enough ht save when a furnace door opens and 
a fiery glow illuminates the bent back and soot- 
blurred face of some cosmopolitan fireman. Over- 

,, head, each lit by a single lamp, are the water-gauges 
— green glass tubes in which the water ebbs and flows 

,j with the motion of the ship. 

Well, the time is going fast — 'twill soon be four 
o'clock, eight bells, and I am relieved. What do I 
think of on "watch".? That's a question! The 
engines chiefly, with an under-current of "other 
things." Often and often, in the dark nooks of my 
dominions, will I see the glimmering, phantom 
light-o'-love. Sometimes it will come and sit beside 
me if all runs smooth, and then I fly across the broad 
blue floors of the tropic night sky towards England. 
Not that my fairy elf is a fair-weather friend. 
Through blinding oil and sweat I have seen grey eyes 
smile and a white hand beckon. In times of trial 



42 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

and sore need I have turned desperately towards that 
faery ghmmer, and never have I come back unen- i 
couraged or unrefreshed, ' 

Of my friend, too, I think often, as I know he 
thinks of me. Of our dear old rooms on the Walk; 
of our cosy evenings alone; of our rambles in search 
of the Perfect Pub (where, he told me, they sold 
hot rum up to 3 a. m.); of the Chelsea Freaks, who 
add so unconsciously to the gaiety of the nations — j 
how I have laughed incontinently, and how some 
fireman's face would brighten when I laughed, 
though he knew not the reason! | 

Of books, too, I have many thoughts; which re- i 

minds me that one cannot imagine how different are 

the "values " of books, out here at sea, to their values i 

. I 

at home in the metropolis. To steal a phrase from I 

chemistry, their "valency" alters. Their relative 
"combining weights" seem to vary; by which I i 
mean, their applicability to life, their vital import- 
ance to me as a man, changes. This change, more- 
over, is all in favour of the classics. One sees { 
through shams more quickly — at least, I think 
so. Books which I could always respect, yet never 
touch, now come forth and show their glories to 
me. My own past work, too, drops pathetically into 
its own place. And that is? Spare me this con- 
fession ! 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 43 

One night, one star-light night, when the dark blue 
heaven, slashed across with the pale immensity of the 
Milky Way, watched me with its million winking eyes, 
I stole out on the poop with some stories in my hand, 
and dropped them into the creamy rush of the wake. 
As the poor little bits of paper swayed and eddied and 
drowned in the foaming vortex, I felt, deep down in 
that heart which some say I do not possess, a vague 
tremor of unrest. I felt, somehow, close to Eter- 
nity. And then, as I went below once more, I 
wondered, "Will they all go hke that.?" ."Shall I 
live to do a7iy good work?" Oh, the terrible sadness 
of Noble Attempts! How I toiled at those stories! 
And all for nothing. Flung, Hke the ashes from our 
furnaces, like the rubbish from our larders, into the 
cruel oblivion of the unheeding sea. 



IX 



Such is the mood which comes over me at times 

3 when the pettiness of the past starts up in the pres- 

i ence of these immensities of sea and sky. M., you 

p know, when he would come back to his studio from 

some yachting cruise in the Channel, and find me 

in his armchair, would drag me out to look at the 

ceaselessly changing glories of the river at sunset, 

and tell me how the vastness of the sea always com- 



44 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

municated to him an overwhelming sense of the 
Power of God. 

"You can't get away from it, old man," he would 
say. "Out there alone, man is nothing, God is 
everything." Why could I never assent to that? 
Why, when people ask me if I love the sea, am I 
silent? Well, have you ever heard the sudden yap- 
ping of a puppy at night? Imagine it, then, at 
sea. The two Immensities between which we creep: 
the sea flashing with her own secret glory of phos- 
phorescent fire, the sky emblazoned with her count- 
less diadems, and then — yap-yap-yap! That is how 
the pestilent cackle of many people affects me when 
they rave about the sea. Why do they not keep 
silent, like the stars? God! These fools, I think, 
would clatter up the steps of the Great White 
Throne, talking, talking, talking! When the pearly 
gates swing wide to let us in, when we pace the bur- j 
nished vistas towards the Presence, when the measure- | 
less music of the Most High God fills our hearts — ' 
yap-yap-yap I j 

Music, I said! I think I stand towards music as I j 
stand towards sea and sky. Oh, I could squirm when I | 
think of the bickerings I have had with music-lovers. 
And yet with you, my friend, prince of music-lovers, 
I have had no quarrel. Because, I think, you let 
me alone. When you feel in the mood, when the 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 45 

moon is on the river, and the warm breeze gently 
sways the curtains by the open window, you will sit 
down and improvise, and I will lie in my deep chair, 
and smoke and dream. You cease, and say "Do you 
like it?" and I am silent. 

Then you laugh and go on again. You under- 
stand. But what maniacal frenzy is this which 
demands a vociferous "passionate love of music" 
from everyone? Watch the current dish-water 
fiction. Every character, male and female, is "pas- 
sionately fond of music." Which means? That the 
readers of this stuff consider a passionate love of 
music to be fashionable. It is so easy, you see, to 
possess it. There is no need to study either musical 
theory, practice, history, or biography. An inane 
expression of vacuous content when music is being 
rendered, a quantity of rhapsodical rubbish about 
Chopin and Beethoven without any knowledge of 
. either, and behold! a lover of music. Yap-yap- 
yap ! 

With all this, I know, you agree, but you ask your- 
self, as you read, what has this to do with a marine 
engineer's working day? It has everything to do 
with it. It has everything to do with the working 
day of every man. For this indiscriminate belauding 
of the love of music leads to an almost unimaginable 
hypocrisy among those who do not think. Cer- 



46 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

talnly, Music is the highest of the Arts, and the old- 
est, just (I presume) as Astronomy is the highest and 
most ancient science. One is pure form, the other 
pure mathematics. And so, I may conclude, the 
''Music of the Spheres" comprises all that is highest 
and purest and truest within our comprehension. 
But this fashionable, open-mouthed delirium is no 
more a worship of music than star-gazing is serious 
astronomy. These hypocrites are sailing under false 
colours. I noticed, when I once suggested at a 
dinner-table the cultivation of the tin whistle, amuse- 
ment among the men, and titters among the women. 
When I asked why old Pan's instrument should be so 
bespattered with ridicule, they were instantly serious, 
as is their habit when you mention any one who has 
passed away. You see my point .f* I protest against 
this nasty slime of hypocrisy which is befouling every 
part of our intellectual and national life. We love 
the sea, we old sea-dogs, descendants (we proudly 
think) of the mighty Norsemen — ^we love it from 
Brighton Beach. We love Sport, do we who sneer 
at Frenchmen because they cannot play football — 
we love it from the closely packed amphitheatres of 
the race-course and footer-field, as spectators. We 
love War — with a penny flag and a yell in front of 
the Mansion House. We love Children, for we 
leave them to dwell in slums. And we love Music 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 47 

with all our hearts, because we were told that we did, 
and the wise repeat that it elevates and refines the 
soul. 

X 

I AM disappointed with the meagre letter my friend 
sends me, "in haste"! Disappointed and surprised 
withal, inasmuch as he finds time to say, hastily 
enough, "Give me of your best; describe, toujour s, 
describe!" To which I can only reply, "Humph!" 
Mon ami, I do not write for the sake of showing off 
my penmanship, nor my authorship. When I have 
time, I lie down, on my stuffed-seaweed bed, and 
write my thoughts leisurely and enjoyably. A letter 
is something which would not be set down if the two 
persons concerned were within speaking distance. 
The mere fact that I endeavour to give my jottings 
some rude literary finish proves nothing to the con- 
trary. When we are gathered together round the 
fire or the tea-table, the same thing obtains. The 
difference between conversation and tittle-tattle lies 
in the participants of the former giving a finish to 
their contributions, watching for points, keeping the 
main channel of conversation clear of the lumber of 
extraneous witticism and personalities, gradually 
leading the timid to think and, later, to express their 
thoughts, using the learning which they have ac- 



48 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

quired in secret for the edification or building-up of 
us all. 

I remember how, when young H visited our 

anchorage, he sat silent and abashed while we thun- 
dered and declaimed about his bewildered head. 
And then, when the conversation moved, naturally- 
enough, from education to religion, from religion to 
science, and from science to evolution, I noticed how, 
so to speak, he pricked up his ears. He was thinking 
then, trying to realize, however faintly, that inside 
him was something different to anything inside us. 
His Catholic training, his sequestered up-bringing, his 
entomological studies, his intellectual resiliency^ so 
deftly utilized by the Society of Jesus — all these came 
gradually into view, and we found truth, which is 
perfected praise, emanating from the babe by whom, 
I had been assured, we were to be bored to distraction. 

We realize only too little what has been lost 
through the decay of conversation. "Comey let us 
reason together'' And ^'letters" are only a form of 
reasoning together adapted to our special needs, 
gaining perhaps some added pathos from the implied 
separation of kindred souls, and a further value from 
the permanence and potential artistry of the form 
itself. It is not incumbent upon us to be very deep 
in the eighteenth century to remark that, with con- 
versation, letter-writing dwindles and dies before 



i 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 49 

the rush of mechanism and trade. It is easy to see 
the reason of this. Mechanism and trade are ex- 
pressions of dissatisfaction with one's circumstances. 
Men used machines to make and carry commodities, 
not because they felt the exquisite joy of making, 
or the still higher joy of giving, but because they, or 
their wives, wanted larger houses, more splendid 
equipages, more sumptuous provender. Conversa- 
tion, on the other hand, implies leisure and content- 
ment of mind, I do not mean idlers and persons of 
no ambition. Neither of these classes ever wrote 
letters or shone in conversations. 

So, musing upon my friend's hasty screed, I wonder 
how I am, in very truth, to give him of my best. 
True, I know from that hint that he is fighting with 
beasts at Ephesus to get his play into working, or 
rather playing order. This is sufficient to make me 
forgive my friend. But consider in future, mon amiy 
that your letters are the only conversation I can 
enjoy out here, for the heroes with whom I toil know 
not the art. 

XI 

The transition of a great nation from barbarism to 
an elementary form of culture is always interesting. 
So, too, is the same transition in the case of a "great 
profession." In 1840, when the propulsion of ships 



50 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

by means of a steam-driven screw opened a new era 
in maritime history, the "practical man" in the en- 
gineering trade was an uneducated savage. Possess- 
ing no trade union, no voice in ParHament, no means 
of educating himself in the intricate theory of the 
machinery he helped to build, the mechanic of sixty 
years ago was regarded by those above him in the 
social scale merely as a *'hand." When, therefore, 
steamships became common, and men were needed 
to operate and care for the propelling mechanism, 
they were naturally drawn from the ranks of me- 
chanics who were employed in the works to construct 
it. Stokers were enlisted, in a similar way, from 
those working on land-boilers. Here, then, were two 
new classes of seamen, corresponding very largely to 
the officers and sailors of a sailing-ship. To the un- 
biassed judgment, it went without saying that the 
engineer on watch would take rank with the navigat- 
ing officer on watch; but the old school of mariners, 
the school whose ideas of progress are crystallised for 
all time in the historic report of certain Admiralty 
Lords that "steam power would never be of any prac- 
tical use in Her Majesty's Navy," thought differently. 
In their opinion, the engineer was the same as a 
stoker, and from that day almost to this the deck- 
officer who served his time in a sailing-ship secretly 
regards the engineers of his steamer as upstarts 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 51 

more or less, whose position and pay are a gross 
encroachment upon his own more ancient privi- 
leges. 

A httle consideration will show that there was some 
reason for this feeling in the beginning. In the case 
of the Royal Navy, the aggravation was particularly 
acute. The deck-officers, then as now, were sons of 
gentlemen, were members of an ancient and honour- 
able service, a service included among that select 
quaternity, to be outside of which was to be a nonen- 
tity — the Navy, the Army, the Church, and the Bar. 
The naval officer, then as now, did not soil his hands, 
wore a sword, and was swathed in an inextricable 
meshwork of red tape, service codes, and High Tory- 
ism. He had his own peculiar notions of studying a 
profession, looked askance at the new-fangled method 
of driving a ship, honestly thinking, with Ruskin, 
that a "floating kettle" was a direct contravention of 
the laws of God. Imagine, then, the aristocratic 
consternation of these honourable gentlemen when 
the care and maintenance of propelling machinery, 
auxiliary mechanism, and also guns and gun- 
mountings, were gradually transferred to a body of 
men of low social extraction, uncultured and un- 
polished land-lubbers and civilians! Only within the 
last twenty years have naval engineer officers, now 
drawn from the same social strata as the navigating 



52 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

officers, won official recognition of their importance 
in the personnel of a ship. 

In the case of the engineers of the Mercantile 
Marine the struggle has been the same, though by 
no means so bitter or so sustained. The reasons for 
this are two. 

In the first place, the navigating officers of a mer- 
chantman are merely the employees of civilians — the 
shipowners. In the second place, the Board of 
Trade, by compelling shipowners to carry a certain 
number of navigators and engineers holding certifi- 
cates of competency, have placed them on one 
professional level. Nevertheless, the animosity be- 
tween the mates and the shrewd, greasy, sea-going 
engineer was keen enough, sharpened no doubt by 
the preponderating wages of the latter. Again, the 
former's habits of deference and mute obedience to 
the master, at once navigator, agent, and magistrate 
of the ship, were not readily assimilated by the engi- 
neer, whose democratic consciousness was just then 
rising into being, and whose mechanical instincts 
were outraged by the sailor's ignorant indifference to 
the knowledge and unremitting vigilance demanded 
by the machinery in his care. 

It is in this fashion that a class of men like my 
Chief have developed. Born of the lower middle 
class, the artisan class, apprenticed to their trade at 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 53 

twelve or thirteen years of age, and, on going to sea, 
suddenly finding themselves in possession of a definite 
uniform and rank with a fixed watch and routine, 
their natural instinct leads them to do their utmost 
to "live up " to their new dignity. In course of time, 
after a certain minimum of sea service, and an un- 
broken record of efficiency and good behaviour, the 
Board of Trade examiner afl&xes his stamp on the fin- 
ished product, and the youth ventures on matrimony 
and indulges in dreams of rising in the world. His 
travelling has given his mind a certain shallow breadth 
of outlook; he will discuss Italian art with you, al- 
though his knowledge of Italy is confined to the low 
parts of Genoa and Naples, with perhaps a visit to the 
Campo Santo of the former. He has acquired the 
reading habit, perforce, at sea, though his authors 
would be considered dubious by the educated; and a 
smattering of some other language, generally Spanish, 
is, in his own opinion, good reason for holding himself 
above the common mechanic ashore. His salary as a 
chief engineer enables his wife to keep a servant and 
buy superior garments; he puts money by, and in 
the course of time solidifies his position as a genuine 
bourgeois. In the meantime he exhales Smiles. He 
believes in Rising in the World. He would blot out 
a perfectly inoffensive, if ignoble, ancestry, and he 
would also, if he could, make friends with English 



54 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

Grammar. But how can I hope for his success in 
the latter struggle when the books he borrows from 
my little store are returned uncut. Possibly the col- 
ourless eyes, which survey me over the retrousse nose 
and deceptive moustache, are capable of gathering 
wisdom from the uncut fields of learning. And yet, 
and yet, have I not unintentionally surprised him in 
his cabin devouring "The Unwritten Command- 
ment" or "The Lady's Realm," while my Aristo- 
phanes is on the settee? I do not blame a sea-going 
engineer for disliking Aristophanes, Many agricul- 
tural labourers would find him uninforming. But 
why borrow him and simulate a cultured interest in 
his plays? 

My friend, I think, abhors blatant uxoriousness. 
So do L And I fear the Most Wonderful Man on 
Earth is blatantly uxorious. I honour him for a cer- 
tain sadness in his voice when he speaks of unrequited 
love. But his constant reference to Ibsen's motij 
in the "Wild Duck," though it fails in its primary 
object of convincing me that he is familiar with 
Ibsen's plays, does in truth tell me that some fair 
one gave him sleepless nights. 

Of course, this amusing assumption would not 
stand a single hour in a cultured circle. Some 
periodicals of the day foster the fallacy in many 
an unfortunate mind that to read about a book is 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 55 

really quite as good as actually to read it. Their 
readers are led to infer that learning is quite a spare- 
time affair, I once assured a victim of this delusion 
that in true culture there was no threepence-in-the- 
shilling discount; and he wrinkles his brows yet, I 
believe, wondering what I meant. How many years 
of close study, my friend, are required to enable one 
to stroll through a second-hand bookshop, pick up the 
07ie treasure from the shelves, and walk out again? 

It may be, perchance, that I labour this trait in 
the character of one who would be great but for his 
disabilities. Which thought recalls to my mind a 
suspicion that intermittently haunts me — that, living 
as we do here on this ocean tramp, "thrown together," 
as the phrase goes, so constantly, faults in another 
man grow more and more apparent; social abrasions 
which would be smoothed down and forgotten ashore 
are roughened at each fresh encounter, until the man 
is hidden behind one flaming sin. Especially is this 
to be expected when mind and body are worn, the one 
with responsibility, the other with rough toil. Who 
am I that I should claim cultured intercourse from 
these heroes? Have I not shared their agony and 
bloody sweat in times of storm and stress? Have I 
not seen this same wearer of elevators in his engine- 
room, a blood-stained handkerchief across his head 
where he has been "smashed," the sweat running 



56 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

from his blackened features, watching his engines 
with an agony no young mother ever knew? 

What of the time when our main steam pipe burst 
in the Irish Sea in a fog? Read in the Chief Mate's 
log an entry, ''Delayed 2 hrs. 40 min.y breakdown in 
engine-room." Simple, isn't it? But behind those 
brief words lies a small hell for the Chief Engineer. 
Behind them lies two hours and forty minutes' fren- 
zied toil in the heat of the boiler-tops, where the 
arched bunkers keep the air stifling; two hours and 
forty minutes' work with tools that race and slither to 
the rolling of the ship, with bolts that burn and blister, 
with steam that knows no master when she's loose. 
Literature? Art? Old friend, these gods seem very 
impotent sometimes. They seem impotent, as when, 
for instance, my first gauge-glass burst. Pacing up 
and down in front of my engines, there is a hiss and 
a roar, and one of my firemen rushes into the engine- 
room, his right hand clasping the left shoulder con- 
vulsively. He has been cut to the bone with a 
piece of the flying glass. Men of thirty years' sea- 
time tell me they never have got used to a glass fail- 
ing. And then the fight with the water and steam in 
the darkness, the frenzied groping for the wires to 
shut the cocks, the ceaseless roar of water and steam! 
A look at the engines, an adjustment of the feed- 
valves, lest the water get low while I am fitting a new 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 57 

glass, and then to work. How glad one is when one 
sees that luminous ring, which denotes the water- 
level, rise "two-thirds glass" once more! And how 
far from the fine arts is he whose life is one long 
succession of incidents like these? Can they blame 
us if we look indulgently upon mere writers and 
painters? Surely, when the books are opened and 
the last log is read, when the overlooker calls our 
names and reads out the indictment "Lacking cul- 
ture," we may stand up manfully and answer as clearly 
as we can, "Lord, we had our business in great 
waters." 

XII 

In such wise, I imagine, will George the Fourth 
reply. He is an admirable foil to the Most Wonder- 
ful Man on Earth. He regales you with no false 
sentiment; he is five feet ten in his socks, and he is 
clamorously indignant when you suggest that he 
will one day "get married." He considers love to be 
"damned foolishness," and despises "womanisers." 
He likes "tarts," has one in most ports of the Atlantic 
sea-board, and even writes to a certain Mexican 
enchantress, who lives in a nice little room over a 
nice little shop in a nice little street in the nice little 
town of Vera Cruz. What does he write? Frankly 
I don't know. What does he say, when he has dressed 



58 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

himself in dazzling white raiment and goes ashore in 
Surabaya or Singapore, and sits down to tea with 
Japanese girls whose eyes are swollen with belladonna 
and whose touch communicates fire? How can I 
answer ? 

"George," I say, "what would your mother 
think?" 

George is not communicative. He flicks ash from 
his cigarette and picks up a month-old Reynolds's. 
And that is a sufficient answer to my accusations, 
though he does not realize it. I, at any rate, have 
not the face to upbraid a lonely youth, without home 
or girl friends from one year's end to another, when in 
that same Reynolds's I see page after page of "cases." 
If these people swerve, if they break the tables of the 
law every week, surely George the Fourth may hold 
up his head. You see, in Geordie-land, in the ports 
of Tyne and Wear, where George the Fourth was 
bred, there are many engineers who have been out in 
steamers working up and down the China coast, who 
have had nice little homes in Hankow, Hong-Hong, 
or Shanghai, with Japanese wives all complete. 
Then when the charter was up, and the steamer came 
home, these practical men left homes and wives 
behind them, and all was just as before. That is 
George's dream. "China or Burma coast-trade. 
That's the job for me when I get ma tickut." It is 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 59 

useless for a stern moralist like me to argue, because 
I feel certain that, being what he is, he would be en- 
tirely wise and right. 

What an utter futility is marriage to a sea-going 
engineer! Here is my friend McGorren, a hard- 
working and Christian man. He is chief of a boat in 
the Burmese oil trade. His wife is dead; he has 
three children, who are being brought up with their 
cousins in North London. McGorren has been out 
East two years. It will be another two years before 
he can come home. Where is the morality of this ? 
He has no home. His little ones grow up strangers to 
him; they are mothered by a stranger. He is vote- 
less, yet subject to income tax. He can have no 
friendships, no society, no rational enjoyment save 
reading. Nothing! And what is his return? Four 
hundred a year and all found. I look into the frank 
eyes of George the Fourth and I am mute. In no 
philosophy, in no "Conduct of Life," in no "Lesson 
for the Day" which I have read can I discover any 
consolation or sane rule of living for such as he. Is 
not this a terrible gap in Ruskin, Emerson, and Co. .? 
I take up the first and I ask George to listen. He is 
perfectly willing, because, he says with reverence, 
I am "a scholar," and I have read to him before. 

". . . There must be work done by the arms, 
or none of us could live. There must be work done 



6o AN OCEAN TRAMP 

by the brains, or the hfe we get would not be worth 
having. And the same men cannot do both. There 
is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; 
there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must 
do it; and it is physically impossible that one class 
should do, or divide, the work of the other. And it 
is of no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by 
fine words, and to talk to the workman about the 
honourableness of manual labour and the dignity 
of humanity. Rough work, honourable or not, takes 
the life out of us; and the man who has been heaving 
clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an express train 
against the north wind all night, or holding a collier's 
helm in a gale on a lee shore, or whirling white-hot 
metal at a furnace mouth, is not the same man at the 
end of his day, or night, as one who has been sitting 
in a quiet room, with everything comfortable about 
him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or painting 
pictures." 

George nods. He understands exactly what is 
meant. His father is skipper of a collier, his brother 
is in a steel works. Probably he and I know, better 
than John Ruskin, how rough work "takes the life 
out of us." But when I continue, and read to him 
what the wise man teaches concerning justice to men, 
and never-failing knight-errantry towards women, 
and love for natural beauty, even awe-struck George 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 6i 

becomes slightly sardonic, and his mouth comes down 
at the corners. Let me formulate his thoughts. He 
is asking how can one be just when the work's got 
to be done, and blame must fall on somebody's shoul- 
ders? How can one feel and act rightly towards 
women when one is young, yet compelled to live a 
life of alternate celibacy and licence? How can one 
love nature, even the sea, when the engine-room tem- 
perature is normally 90° F., and often 120° F., when 
the soul cries out against the endless rolling miles? 
Wise of the world, give answer! We two poor rough 
toilers sit at your feet and wait upon your words. 

You will see, now, why I want George the Fourth 
to fall in love. But with whom is he to fall in love? 
Who courts the society of a sailor in a foreign port? 
Seamen's bethels? Ah, yes! The gentle English 
ladies in foreign ports are very sympathetic, very 
kind, very pleasant, at the Wednesday evening con- 
cert in the rebuilt Genoese palace or the deserted 
Neapolitan hotel, or the tin tabernacle amid the white 
sand and scrub; but they take good care to keep to- 
gether at the upper end of the room, and the audience 
is railed off from them if possible, while the merry 
girls outside, who live shameful lives, and whose exist- 
ence is ignored by the missionary, link their arms in 
George's and take him to their cosy little boxes high 
up behind those beautiful green blinds. 



62 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

"It's a hell of a life, but we've just got to mak' the 
best of it," says George, and he lounges off to join the 
talk in the Second's room. 

I, too, sigh when he is gone. The best of it! Are 
these heroes of mine right after all ^. 

*' Then wherefore sully the entrusted gem 
Oj high and noble life with thoughts so sick ? 
Why pierce high-fronted honour to the quick 
For nothing but a dream ?" 

XIII 

It is an hour since George the Fourth left me, and I 
have been discussing the matter with the Mate. It 
is a habit of mine to discuss matters with the Mate. 
Here is a man with no theories of life, no culture, as 
we understand the term, no touch of modern life at 
all; a man of apostolic simplicity, having gone down 
to the sea in ships since 1867. You can depend on 
the practicability of his conclusions, because he has 
dealt with facts — since 1867. "For," to quote Car- 
lyle, "you are in contact with verities, to an unexam- 
pled degree, when you get upon the ocean, with in- 
tent to sail on it . . . bottomless destruction 
raging beneath you and on all hands of you, if you 
neglect, for any reason, the methods of keeping it 
down and making it float you to your aim!" 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 63 

" 'Tis a hard life, Mr. McAlnwick, an' we've just 
got to make the best of it." 

"But, Mr. Honna, what is the best of it.?" 

"This! Give us your glass. One more, an' 
Nicholas is makin' a Stonewall Jackson in the pan- 
thry. He'll be in in a minute." 

In a minute Nicholas arrives with a jug. Nicholas 
is the Steward, at sea since '69, a bronzed Greek from 
Salonika, a believer in dreams and sound investments 
at six per cent. He brings in a Lloyd's News, arrived 
by the last mail. 

"Ah!" The Mate is certainly making the best of 
it. What are the exact components of the drink I 
cannot determine, but the resultant is without blem- 
ish; eggs, milk, brandy, rum — all these are in it, and 
the Mate's tongue loosens. 

"Have you seen this about ze Lorenzo, mister?" 
asks Nicholas. 

"What's that?" 

Nicholas (reading): "'Ze s.s. Lorenzo, bound 
from New Yawk to Cuba with coke, met with heavy 
gales off Cape Hatteras, and has put back into Nor- 
folk in a disabled condition. Two blades of her 
propeller are broken, and she is leaking badly amid- 
ships. She is to undergo a special survey before 
proceeding further.'" 

The Mate's visage is wrinkled, his mouth is pursed 



64 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

up as he sets down his glass and adjusts his spectacles 
to read, and he nods his head. 

"See, now, 'tis two years, two years an' a half, 
since I left her. Nicholas, you were there then, were 
ye not?" 

*'Ess, mister. She was on the Western Ocean 
trade then, too." 

"Aye! Lumber out o' St. John's to Liverpool." 
He lays down the paper. "Mr. McAlnwick, now 
wait while I tell ye. Ye talk of honesty at sea? I 
joined that ship in Glasgow, an' we signed on for the 
voy'ge, winter North Atlantic. General cargo for 
St. John's, Newf'unlan', with deals to bring back to 
Liverpool. And, though you may consider me super- 
stitious, not havin' been long at sea" (Nicholas 
stands, legs apart, glass in hand, head nodding 
sagely), "not havin' been long at sea, I say, 'twas the 
Second and Fourth engineers who brought us black 
luck!" 

"How, Mr. Honna?" 

"This way. Nicholas, sit ye down and listen. I 
was Mate, as I am here. I went up from London and 
joined her, an' the Chief, who's here now, was thick 
as thieves with the old man, an' was courtin' the 
youngest daughter, tho' he never married her — he 
came to lay down the law to me. There was a spare 
stateroom for'ard of the alley-way, port side. The 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 65 

door was locked, an' I wanted it open. Ses he, * 'Tis 
locked.' Ses I, *I want it open.' Ses he, 'Who are 
you?' Ye know his way, Mr. McAlnwick .? Ses I, 
'I'm the Mate o' this ship, an', by Gawd, if that door 
isn't opened smart, ye're a better man than I am.' 
And I took off me coat. 'Oh,' ses he, ' 'tis all right, 
mister, I'll have it opened.' Ye see, there was women 
aboard, an' the Second and Fourth were responsible." 
"They were inside!" snickers Nicholas, looking at 
his cigar reminiscently. 

; "They was, Mr. McAlnwick. 'Twas scandalous 

' — that Chief, too, trapesin' away out to Scotstoun 
Hill every evenin' to play cards an' shilly-shally, 

■ while his juniors had loose females aboard the ship. 
Well, we put out, made St. John's in sixteen days, 
and discharged in a fortn't. 'Twas there the Second 
an' Fourth began again, but they took me in. I came 
on deck one Saturday afternoon, the old man being 
ashore, and saw two females, with sealskin muffs 
and furred spats, lookin' roun' the poop an' liftin' 
their skirts over the ropes, for all the world like real 
ladies. An' I treated them as such, never thinkin' 

\ what they were, for to me a lady's a lady, an' I know 
how to behave to them. But the Second Mate 
stopped me as I was showin' 'em over all, and ses he, 
'D'yer know what she is, Mr. Honna?' pointin' to 

i the one with a heliatrope blouse under her jacket." 



66 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

There is another snicker from Nicholas, and the 
Mate goes on: 

"I would not believe it, Mr. McAlnwick. I've had 
my weaknesses, I have some now, or I would not be 
Mate of this ship. But I've never insulted my em- 
ployers by makin' a — a bloomin' seraglio o' the ship, 
nor have I ever seen it done without bringin' black 
luck. Now, wait till I tell ye. The nex' mornin', 
being on deck at seven o'clock, I saw the Second and 
Fourth racin' up the dock. Their collars were loose 
at the back, an' their waistcoats were all out o' gear, 
an' they'd made hat-bands o' their ties. Mr. McAln- 
wick, ye may laugh, but they were a disgrace to the 
ship! 

"Well, we put out o' St. John, deck-loaded with 
deals, in a fog, and we stayed in a fog for three days. 
We were all among the ice, too, an' that afternoon I 
came on deck to relieve Mr. Bruce, the Second Mate. 
The old man had her in an ice-lane, goin' full speed. 
Ses I, 'She's goin' fast, sir.' 'Oh,' ses he, *she steers 
better so.' 'Ay,' ses I, 'but if she hits anything, she 
will — hit it.' A minute after, he come up out o' the 
fog, an' ses he, 'Stop her, Mr. Honna, stop her!' 
I'd me hand on the telegraph and me eye on the foc'sle 
head when she struck — bang! An' all the canvas 
caps on the foc'sle ventilators blew up an' went over- 
board. We'd hit a cake. The Second Mate ran out 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 67 

of his berth in his shirt-sleeves, and went for'ard, an* 
I followed him. There she was, her nose crunched 
into a low-lyin' cake not two feet above the water- 
line. I kept all my spare gear in the fore-peak, an' 
the Second Mate went down to — to reconnoitre. 
"Tis all right, mister,' ses he. * 'Tis all right here.' 
Ses I, ' I don't think, Mr. Bruce, I don't think ! ' An' 
when I went down an' put me foot on those piles of 
rope an' bolts of canvas, they went down, all soft, 
under me. Ye understand.? Oh, I knew there was 
somethin', rememberin' those flighty women, an' the 
foc'sle bonnets blowin' off. The water had rushed 
into the forepeak, an' had driven the air up, ye see. 
"Well, we put her full astern and drew away, and 
then we put back into St. John, slow, dead slow, all 
the way. An' there the Second Engineer saw a doc- 
tor, an' the one in the heliatrope blouse saw a ghost!" 

"Ess, 'e come up be'ind 'er, an' " 

"Now, hold yer horses, Nicholas, hold yer horses! 
Ye see, Mr. McAlnwick,when awoman has seen a man 
aboard of a ship, an' she's seen that ship hull down, 
or, what's the same thing, swallowed up in the fog, 
she writes him off, so to speak. 'Poor feller,' ses she, 
*he's at sea,' just as we say, 'Poor feller, he's in the 
churchyard.' An' so, when that woman felt some- 
one touch her on the arm in Main Street, and turned 
an' found it was the Second Engineer, she gave a 



68 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

shriek like a lost soul, an' fainted on the sidewalk. 
So it happened. Now listen. Help yourself, Nicho- 
las. 

"We had a wooden bow put on, which took a week, 
an' we started again. Two days out it fell off, and 
we went back into St. John for the third time, an' 
had another fitted. I took the opportunity then of 
havin' a word with the Second, while we were makin' 
her fast. 'Mr. Carson,' ses I, 'air ye satisfied?' He 
knew what I meant, for he came from Carrickfergus, 
an' the Lady's Fever had him hard. 'Aye, mister,' 
ses he. ' 'Tis all right; I'll see her no more,' ses he. 
An' our luck turned. We had another bow fitted, 
an' we came across the Western Ocean, half-speed, 
an' made her fast in the Canada Dock." 

"Isthat all, Mr. Honna?" 

*'No, no," says Nicholas, with another reminiscent 
giggle. "No, mister, the Super, 'e comes down, an' 
e 

"Hold yer horses, now, Nicholas; hold yer horses, 
and let Jack Honna tell this yarn. Mr. McAlnwick, 
I said I'd show ye honesty as practised in the Mercan- 
tile Marine. Now listen. The Super — that's Mr. 
Fallon, as ye know — came down into my bferth. 
'Mornin', Honna' — ye know his way; but he seemed 
anxious an' fidgety. Of course, I knew without telHn' j 
how she was insured. Ye see, mister, the Lorenzo \ 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 69 

an' the Julio an' the Niccolo an' the Benvenuto here 
are insured against total loss, an' if we went on that 
reef to-night, Messrs, Crubred, Orr, and Glasswell 
'ud drink champagne to it an' book our half-pay in 
tobacco and stamps. But then — ah, Mr. McAlnwick, 
then it was different. The Lorenzo was insured 
against accidents to the tune o' three thousand pound 
sterling, provided — provided, ye understand, that 
repairs came up to that figure. An' that was why 
Mr. Fallon looked worried." 

"Why, Mr. Honna?** The Mate's voice drops to 
a whisper. 

"Why, don't ye see, mister? But ye've not been 
long at sea. Because he'd totted up all the indents, 
an' added all he reasonably could on the bow plates 
an' stringers plus a new double bottom to the fore- 
hold, an' then he could only make it come to about 
twenty-four hundred pound. 'What's to be done, 
Honna ? ' ses he, rappin' it out. 'What's to be done ? ' 
ses I, as if I was astonished. 'What d'ye mean, Mr. 
Fallon?' Ses he, ' 'Tis a dead loss — a dead loss, 
Honna.' Ses I, 'I don't understand, sir.' And I 
looked him in the eye. 'She's not hurt,' ses he, 
snappin'. 'She's not hurt at all.' 'Oh,' ses I, 'is 
that all? Why not hurt her, then — hurt her?' An' 
I got up to go out. 'Oh,' ses he, 'we can't have that 
! — ^we can't have that. Where's that indent?' And 



70 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

we went on deck. Well, I went up to the ofRce that 
afternoon he came over, an' he ses in a hurry, 
*Honna, yer wife's comin' up to-night, ye said?' 
(The little man never forgets anythin', as perhaps 
ye've noticed.) 'Yes,' ses I, 'she is.' 'Then go an' 
meet her,' ses he. 'Go an' meet her.' 'What.?' ses 
I. 'Leave the ship, with her goin' into dry-dock 
to-morrer an' no cap 'en aboard?' 'Damn the ship,' 
ses he. 'Damn the ship! /'// look after the ship. 
Go an' see yer wife.' Mr. McAlnwick, when I got 
outside I laughed. An' when I got to Lime Street, 
and told my girl about Fallon damnin' the ship, she 
laughed too. It must have been eleven o'clock when 
I left the hotel an' went down to the docks. When I 
got there she was in dry-dock. The Super had issued 
orders that s.s. Lorenzo was to be dry-docked after 
dark, an' I saw that our luck was in. The Second 
Engineer was standin' by the ladder as I climbed over 
the side, an' ses he, solemn-like, 'Mr. Honna, I've 
been to see a doctor this night, an' I'm all right now. 
I'll see her no more,' 'Of course ye're all right!' ses 
I, chucklin', 'an' so's the Lorenzo. Come down an' 
have somethin'.' 'What are they doin'?' ses he. *I 
was below this five minutes, an' I thought the bottom 
was comin' in.' 'Repairs,' ses I, wavin' me hand. 
* Repairs. Come down.' An' we went. 'Twas half- 
past one when we got down on the dock side an* 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 71 

peeped under. An' when we'd done laughin' we 
turned in. 

"Well, I went down into the dock nex' mornin*, 
an' the Surveyor was there with Mr. Fallon. He 
was a youngish man, an' probably he's learnt a good 
deal since that day, but he was just the feller for us. 
The Super introduced us, an' ses he, 'Mr. Honna will 
corroborate what I say, Mr. Blythe.' The Surveyor 
turned to look at the ship's bottom, and it was lucky 
he did, for me jaw was hangin'. Mr. McAlnwick, 
they'd had the hydraulic jacks under her, an' they'd 
pushed her to kingdom come! She was bent to the 
very keelson. Not a straight plate from stem to 
stern. 'It's marvellous, Mr. Honna!' ses the Sur- 
veyor. 'It's marvellous! How in the worrld did 
ye come home.'" 'How.?' ses I, laughin'. 'On our 
hands and knees, to be sure, mister.' 'Dear me!' he 
ses. 'Dear me!' 'Aye,' ses I. 'An' she steered to 
a hair, too!' And I went for'ard to look at her bows. 
He was a young man, an' I felt sorry for him, but our 
luck was in. Mr. Fallon came down into my room 
that afternoon, as I was puttin' on me shore clothes, 
an' ses he, 'Honna, did ye see yer wife.?' 'I did, sir,' 
ses I. 'Is she all right?' ses he. 'No,' ses I; 'she's 
frettin'.' 'What's the matter wi' her?' he snaps, 
sittin' down where you are now. 'What?' ses I, an' 
I stopped as I was fixin' me collar. 'She thinks I 



72 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

ought to have a new hat, Mister Fallon.' An' I 
looked him in the eye, *0h ! ' ses he in his sharp way. 
'Get five new hats — get five new hats. Have the 
ship ready to be moved to-morrow night. She will 
be discharged, and redocked for — extended repairs. 
Good-day,' ses he, an' he went out. An' when I 
looked where he'd been sittin' there was a five-poun' 
note in an envelope, stickin' in the cushion." 

"Did you see your wife again, Mr. Honna?" 

"I did, Mr. McAlnwick, an' she pinched me black 
an' blue ! An' when we were walkin' through the city j 
that evenin' I saw the Second Engineer followin' a 
sealskin jacket along Paradise Street, and I felt glad 
he was leavin' to go up for his ticket." 

"Is that all, Mr. Honna?" The Chief Officer's 
face is screwed up, his glasses are on the end of his 
nose (how like my old Headmaster he looks now!), 
and he scrutinizes the Steward's newspaper once 
more. 

"All, Mr. McAlnwick.? Apparently not, by this. 
Mr. Fallon'Il be down to see her, for he's goin' across 
to see the Giacopo, I know, an', by thunder, he'll fix 
her! Never seen him in a fix yet. Eh, Nicholas?" 

"Ah, he's a sharpun, by God!" This from the 
fervent Nicholas. 

"Ses he, first thing when he put his fut on the deck 
when we brought the Ludovico into Shields from 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 73 

NikoIaefF, ses he, 'Honna, look at them slack funnel 
stays; Honna, look at that spare propeller shaft, 
not painted; Honna, don't keep pigs on the saddle- 
back bunker-hatch — 'tis insanitary,' Honna this, 
that, and the other all in one breath. And we'd had 
the blessed stern torn out of her, runnin' foul o' the 
breakwater, to say nothin' of pickin' up the telegraph 
cable with our anchor outside Constant!" 

"Mr. Honna, tell me " 

"To-morrow, mister, to-morrow. 'Tis late, and 
I would turn in." 

And so we end our day. 

XIV 
To-day's shipping news has it thus: — 

Swansea. — Entered inwards, ss. Benvenuto. From 
S. Africa. P. W. D. 

Which cryptic item covers much joy, much money, 
and an irrepressible consumption of strong drink. 
ye rabid total-abstinence mongers ! If I could only 
lure you away on a six-thousand-mile voyage, make 
you work twelve hours a day, turn you out on the 
middle watch, feed you on bully beef and tinned 
milk! Where would your blue ribbons be then? 
My faith, gentlemen, when once you had been paid 



74 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

off at the bottom of Wind Street, I warrant me we 
should not see your backs for dust as you sprinted 
into the nearest hostelry! 

And the joy, moreover, of receiving three months' 
pay in one lump sum! Ah! one is rich as he pushes 
past the green baize swing-door, and through the 
crowd of seamen and sharks who cluster like flies 
round that same green door. To the married sailor, 
however, that joy is chastened by the knowledge that 
his "judy" has been drawing half-pay all the time, 
and to say nothing of the advance note of two- 
pound-ten which he drew on joining, to buy clothes. 
But Jack Tar or Jack Trimmer knows well how to 
drown such worries. He possesses an infinite capac- 
ity for taking liquor, which inevitably goes, not to 
his head, but to his feet. Six of the Benvenuto's 
sailormen, two firemen, and the carpenter enter our 
private bar as we sit drinking. An indescribable 
uproar invades the room immediately. They are in 
their best clothes — decent boots, ready-made blue 
serge, red tie with green spots over a six-penny- 
halfpenny "dickey," and a cap that would make 
even Newmarket "stare and gasp." Nothing will 
pacify them short of drinks at their expense. A 
sailor with yellow hair and moustache curled and 
oiled insuff'erably, insists on providing me with a pint 
of rum. The carpenter, a radical and Fenian when 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 75 

sober, sports a bowler with a decided "list." He 
embraces my yellow-haired benefactor, and now, to 
the music of "Remember Me to Mother Dear," ren- 
dered by the electric piano behind the bar, they waltz 
slowly and solemnly around. The landlady implores 
them to stop, and the carpenter bursts into tears. It 
really is very much like the "Hunting of the Snark." 
They are so unaffectedly wealthy, so ridiculously 
happy, so unspeakably vulgar! They batter their 
silver and gold upon the bar; they command inoffen- 
sive strangers to drink monstrous potations; they ply 
their feet in unconscious single-steps; they forget they 
have not touched the last glass, and order more; 
they put cataclysmal questions to the blushing lassie 
who serves them; they embrace one another repeat- 
edly with maudlin affection, and are finally ejected 
by main force from the premises. All the world — 
below Wind Street — knows that the Benvenuto has 
been paid off. 

And we ? We drink soberly to England, home, and 
beauty, bank our surpluses, and scuttle back to the 
ship. Past interminable rows of huge hydraulic 
cranes, over lock-gates, under gigantic coal-shoots 
which hurl twenty tons of coal at once into the 
gaping holds of filthy colliers, we stumble and hurry 
along to where our own steamer is berthed. That is 
one of the hardships of our exalted position as officers. 



-j^y AN OCEAN TRAMP 

We begin again as soon as we have been paid off; 
they depart, inebriated and uxorious to their homes. 
They enjoy what the poHtical economists call "the 
rewards of abstinence"; we put on our boiler suits and 
crawl about in noisome bilges, soot-choked smoke- 
boxes, and salt-scarred evaporators. 

Nevertheless, when five o'clock strikes and work 
is done for the day, we put on our "shore clothes" 
(the inevitable blue serge of the seamen), light our 
pipes, and go into the town again. Ah ! How good 
it is to see people, people, people! To see cars, 
and shops, and girls again! How wondrously, how 
ineflPably beautiful a barmaid appears to us, who have 
seen no white woman for nearly four months! And 
book-shops! Dear God! I was in the High Street 
for half an hour to-night, and I have already bagged 
a genuine "Galignani" Byron, calf binding, yellow 
paper, and suppressed poems, all complete, for three 
shillings. It will go well in our bookcase beside our 
Guiccioli Recollections. For myself I have a dear 
little "Grammont" with notes, a fine edition of 
Bandello's "Novelle," and a weird paper-covered 
copy of "Joseph Andrews," designed, presumably, 
to corrupt the youthful errantry of Swansea, and 
secreted by the vendor of Welsh devotional literature 
at the very bottom of the tuppenny box. In spite of 
Borrow's enthusiasm for Ab Gwilym, I have no crav- 



AN OCEAN TRAMP yy 

ing for Welsh Theology, mostly by Jones and 
Williams, which is to be had by the cubic ton. No 
one buys it, I fear. The little lass who sold me the 
Fielding and the "Novelle" looked pale and hungry 
behind the stacks of books, and I am shamed, speak- 
ing merely as a thorough-paced buyer of second-hand 
books, that I paid more for the latter than she would 
have asked. But the blue-grey eyes, the nervous 
poise of the head, the pride in the sensitive nostrils, 
reminded me of someone. ... A horrible life 
for a young girl, my friend, a horrible life. 

I took my treasures along the brilliantly lighted 
streets. I walked on air, happy with a mysterious 
happiness. I looked at myself as I passed a shop 
mirror, and saw a face with a cold, cynical expression, 
the soul intrenched behind inscrutable, searching eyes. 
"You do not look happy," I said to myself as I passed 
on, and I smiled. I thought again of those gaudily 
dressed sailors; I thought of their inane felicity, and 
smiled again. "/)<? chacun selon que son hahillete, a 
chacun selon que ses besoins," I muttered as I turned 
into an iridescent music-hall. 

And now I reached the summit of experience. All 
the morning I was toiling in the engine-room as we 
ploughed across the Channel, past Lundy, and up 
to the Mumbles Head. I had played my part in that 
strange comedy of "paying off." I had toiled again 



78 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

in the afternoon in a dry-docked steamer, making all 
safe after shutting down. I had scoured the shelves 
of a tiny shop for books. And now I sat in the fau- 
teuils ol a modern music-hall, beholding the amazing 
drama of "The Road to Ruin." 

Verily, as Saint-Beuve says, " Au theatre on exagere 
toujours." Not that I would accuse the constructors 
of the piece of any lack of skill. Indeed, Scribe him- 
self never displayed more consummate stage-craft or 
a greater sense of "situation," than they. As one 
gazes upon the spectacle of the impossible under- 
graduate's downfall, he loses all confidence in the im- 
possibility; he believes that here indeed lies the road 
to ruin; he feels inexpressibly relieved when the young 
man thanks Heaven for his terrible dream of the 
future, and sits down to Conic Sections, his head be- 
tween his hands. You notice this latter touch. The 
playwright knows his audience. He knows they 
think that an influx of Conic Sections strains the 
cerebral centres, and that study is always carried on 
with the head compressed between the hands. Thus 
the sermon reaches the hearts of those who still have 
occasional nightmares of the time when they conned 
"Parallel lines are those which, if produced ever so 
far both ways, will not meet.*' Alas ! I fear our con- 
ceptions of art are in the same predicament. 

Is it not strange, though, how customs vary.f* In 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 79 

the Middle Ages one went to church to see the mys- 
tery play; now one goes to the music-hall to hear a 
sermon. "Pronounced by clergymen and others to 
be the most powerful sermon ever preached from 
the stage," etc. I wonder, as I scan my programme, 
whether the monastic playwrights of old ever pub- 
lished encomiums on their weird productions by 
prominent highwaymen. I say highwaymen be- 
cause I can think of none who had a better right to 
criticise dramatic performances from the practical 
and moral standpoints. But the noise of the under- 
graduate as he goes crashing through his ruinous 
nightmare recalls me. I proceed to examine my 
companions in distress. All are engaged in the Road 
to Ruin. I think they like stage ruin — it is so thrill- 
ing. Moreover, it leaves out all that is at all middle- 
class. Even our wicked undergraduate never falls 
as low as the middle class. He starts as a university 
man, and ends in a slum, but he is saved from the 
second-class season ticket. I am still puzzling with 
this question of the middle class as I quit the theatre 
and make my way down to the docks. There is a 
mild, misty rain falling, and I turn into my favourite 
tavern in Wind Street for a glass of ale. The Middle 
t Class! Why, I ask myself, are they so strange in 
1" their intellectual tastes.'' The wealthy I understand; 
the workmen I understand; but O this terrible 



8o ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

Middle Class! I sit musing, and four men come in 
upon my solitude. Obviously they are actors, rush- 
ing in for a "smile" between the acts. Obviously, I 
say, for their easy manners, savoir /aire, and good 
breeding stamp them men of the world, and their 
evening dress does the rest. 

"Ah, you read the Clarion?" observes one. I 
start guiltily. Yes, I had bought a copy, and I 
have unconsciously spread it on the table by my 
side. "Will you drink with us, sir?" adds another. 
He is not of the Middle Class. 

"Thank you, I will," I answer, and my first inter- 
locutor glances over the paper. 

"Are you a SociaHst?" he inquires, "Yes," I 
reply. "So am I." I rise, and we shake hands. 
This, my friend, was beyond all my imagining. It 
is, moreover, not middle class. I have ridden in a 
suburban train day after day for years, with people 
who lived in the same street, without exchanging 
a word. Here, in this tavern, convention dares not 
to show her head. And I am warmed as with the 
cheerful sun. 

"Have you been in?" asks the man who hands me 
my beer, and he flings his head back to indicate 
the theatre. 

"Not yet," I answer. "What have you on this 
week?" J 



I 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 8i 

"A Sister' s Sin. You should see it. Come to- 



morrow. 



*'J[ Sister's Sin!" 

I shall not go to see it. I dare not. I had in- 
tended to ask my Socialist whether he could solve 
the problem of the Middle Class for me, but he has 
done it. "-^w theatre on exagere toujours." I 
hardly know which are the more baffling — the 
Middle Ages or the Middle Classes. 



XV 

I HAVE just been looking through an old, old note- 
book of mine, the sort of book compiled, I suppose, 
by every man who really sets out on the long road. I 
remember buying the thing, a stout volume with 
commercially marbled covers, at a stationer's shop 
in the Goswell Road. I wonder if the salesman 
dreamed that it would be used by the grimy appren- 
tice to transcribe extracts from such writers as Kant 
and Lotze, Swinburne and Taine, Emerson and 
Schopenhauer? How strong, how dear to me, was 
all that pertained to Metaphysic in that long ago! 
Often, too, I see original speculations, naive dog- 



82 .4A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

matism, sandwiched between the contextual ex- 
cerpts. 

Worthless, of course — it should be hardly neces- 
sary to say so. And yet, as I turn the leaves, I get 
occasional gUmpses of real thought shining through 
the overstrained self-consciousness, illuminating my 
youthful priggishness of demeanour. For instance, 
how could I have been so prescient to have coupled 
Emerson and Schopenhauer together so persistently? 
Here, smudged and corrected to distraction, is a 
passionate defence of the former, occasioned by some 
academical trifler dubbing him a mere echo of Carlyle 
and Coleridge. I almost lived on Emerson in those 
days, to such good purpose, indeed, that I know him 
by heart. And, if I mistake not, he will come to his 
own again in the near future, when there will be no 
talk of Carlylean echoes. 

All alone, sharing its page with no other thought, 
is this, to me, characteristic phrase: ^^ Mental Par- 
abolism, N. B." It was like a shock to see it once 
more after all these years, and I have been trying to 
understand it. It was born, I think, of my frenzy 
for analogizing. I wanted some analogy, in physical 
phenomena, for everything in my mental experience. 
Professor Drummond was to be left infinitely in the 
rear. And by parabolism, it seems according to a 
later note, I meant that a man's intellectual career 



il 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 83 

is a curve, and that curve is a parabola, being the 
resultant of his mental mass into his intellectual 
force. The importance of this notion impresses me 
more now than then. It will explain how men of 
indubitable genius stop at certain points along the 
road. They can get no further, because their mental 
parabola is complete. All that has happened since 
is to them unreal and unimportant. One man I 
know exemphfies this to a remarkable degree. His 
parabola starts at the seventeenth century, rises to 
its maximum somewhere about the Johnsonian 
period, continues with scarcely abated vigour as 
far as Thackeray and Carlyle, declines towards 
Trollope and — ends. To speak of Meredith and 
Tolstoi, Ibsen and Maeterlinck, is to beat the air. 
The energy is exhausted, the mind has completed 
its curve; the rest is a quiet reminiscence of what has 
been. 

It pleases me to think that there may be some grain 
of truth in all this, though I am not unmindful of the 
inevitable conclusion, that my own parabola will 
i some day take its downward course, and I shall sit, 
Ij quiescent, while the younger men around will de- 
li mand stormily why I cannot see the grandeur, the 
I profundity, of their newer gods. There lies the 
r.i tragedy. Those gods, quite possibly, will be greater 
than mine — must be, if my belief in man be worth 



84 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

anything. Yes, that is the tragedy. I shall be at 
rest, and the youths of the golden future will be see- 
ing visions and dreaming dreams of which I have not 
even the faintest hint. 

I feel this most keenly, when reading Nietzsche, 
that volcanic stammerer of the thing to come. I 
feel, "inside," as children say, that my parabola will 
be finished before I can win to the burning heart of 
the man. It frightens me (a sign of coming fatigue) 
to launch out on one of his torrents of thought — 
veritable rushing rivers of vitriol, burning up all that 
is decaying and fleshly, casting away the refined, 
exhausted, yet exultant spirit on some lonely point 
of the future, where he can see the ilhmitable ocean 
of race-possibilities, 

*'0A, noon of life ! Delightful garden land ! Fair summer 
Station! " 

So, writing (steadying myself against the Atlantic 
roll) one fresh thought in the blank left for it in the 
long ago, I close the book, and take up my present 
life once more. 

*'The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously." 
Perhaps one may judge of a man's power by his re- 
ception of that aphorism. For me, at any rate, 
there is but unconditional assent. To live danger- 
ously! How nauseous to me is the maternal anxiety 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 85 

of some of my friends. They are so anxious for me. 
It is such a dangerous trade. And so on. 

I have been scanning a newspaper left in the mess- 
room, and it has provoked me to further thought. I 
see, in retrospect, those myriads of nicely dressed, 
God-fearing suburbans in their upholstered local 
trains, each with his face turned towards his daily 
sheet, each with his scaly hide of prejudice clamped 
about his soul, each placidly settling the world's 
politics and religion to his own satisfaction, each 
taking his daily dram of news from the same still. 
I look into my own copy and read on one page of 
a society bazaar where Lady So-and-So and the 
Hon. Alicia So-and-So ''presided over a very taste- 
ful stall of dwarf myrtle-trees," etc. 

In another column I am informed that some person 
or other, of whom I have never heard, has gone to 
Wiesbaden. The leading article is devoted to a 
eulogium of some football team, the special article 
asks, "Can we live on twopence a day?" You 
cannot imagine how unutterably turbid all this ap- 
pears to me, out on the green Atlantic. It is Sunday, 
and so we rest; but yesterday afternoon I was out in 
one of the lifeboats, line-fishing for cod. The great 
green rollers came up from the south, and the boat 
rode the billows like a cockle-shell. How I would 
Uke to have had some of those city folk with me in 



86 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

that up-ended lifeboat, their hands red with the cold 
sea water and scarred with the line as it ran through 
their fingers to the pull of a fourteen-pounder. 
Dwarf myrtle-trees ! Wiesbaden! God! Let them 
come below with me, let me take them into our 
boilers and crush them down among those furred 
and salt-scarred tubes, and make them work. They 
used to tell me, when I said I loathed football, that 
I did not know I was alive. Do they, I wonder? 

Yes, the newspaper came to me like a breath of 
foul city air. Very much in the same way I was 
affected by a remark made to me by my friend the 
Mate. "Where I hve," said he, "one child won't 
play with another if its father gets five shillings a 
week more'n t'other's father" We were talking 
Socialism, if I remember rightly, and that was his 
argument against its feasibility. I did not notice 
the argument; I fell to thinking how odd it must be 
to live in such an atmosphere. How is it we never 
have it in Chelsea.'' I have never been the less wel- 
come because my host or hostess has as many pounds 
a week as I have a year. My old friend of my 
'prentice days — dear old Tom, the foreman, and Jack 
Williams, the slinger, they get no colder welcome 
from us because they live in Hammersmith or White- 
chapel. Have we ourselves not seen in our rooms 
rich and poor, artist and mechanic, writer and 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 87 

labourer? Nay, have we not had German clerk 
and Chinese aristocrat, German baron and Russian 
nihilist? What is it that permits us to dispense 
with that snobbery which seems almost a necessary 
of life to the people where the old Mate lives! I 
think it is lack of imagination in our women-folk, 
and the fetish of the home. For surely the utter 
antithesis of "home" is that same "dangerous life." 
These young men who economise and grow stingy 
in their desperate endeavour to establish a "home 
nest," some "Acacia Villa" in Wood Green or Croy- 
don — what can they know of living dangerously? 
Their whole existence is a fleeing from danger. 
Safe callings, safe investments, safe drainage, safe 
transit, safe morality, safe in the arms of Jesus. Is 
it lack of imagination? 

XVI 

So WE, who foregathered yesterday afternoon in 
the shipping office, are lashed together for another 
four months. A motley group, my friend. Outside 
I stood, notebook in hand, trying to find a spare 
fireman who wanted a job. A mob of touts, sharks, 
and pimps crowded round me, hustling each other, 
and then turning away from my call, "Any firemen 
here?" In despair I go over to the "Federation 



88 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

Office," where all seamen are registered in the books 
of life insurance, where they pay their premiums, 
and await possible engineers. I consult with the 
grave, elderly man in the office, and he asks for 
firemen in the bare, cold waiting-room. One man 
comes up, a pale, nervous chap, clean-shaven and 
quiet. I take his ''Continuous Discharge" book, 
flick it open at the last entry — trawling! The last 
foreign-going voyage is dated 1902, "S. Africa." 
"Voyage not completed." I hand it back. "Won't 
do," I remark shortly, and look round for others. 
The man looks at the grave, elderly person, who takes 
the book. "Give him a chance," says the latter, in 
his low, official voice. "Look — S.Africa. The man's 
been serving his country. Give him a chance." "I 
would if he'd promise not to get enteric when we 
reach port," I say. "Never 'ad it yet, sir," says the 
man, and I take his book. " BenvejiiUo. Hurry up. 
She's signing on now." He runs across the road, and 
I follow. 

When I reach the shipping office they are waiting 
for me. Behind the counter and seated beside the 
clerk is the Captain, writing our "advance notes." 
The clerk asks if all are present; we shuffle up closer, 
and he begins to read the articles to which we sub- 
scribe — signing our death-warrants, we call it. No 
one listens to him — he himself is paring his nails, or 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 89 

arranging some other papers as he intones the sen- 
tences which are more famiHar to him and to us than 
the Lord's Prayer to a clergyman. Then, when he 
has finished, each one comes up for catechism — 
carpenter, sailors, donkeyman, fireman, all in due 
order. Then the officers. "Donkeyman!" calls 
the clerk. A huge, muscular figure with a red 
handkerchief round his bull throat ceases arguing 
with a fireman, plunges forward, and seizes the 
pen. He is my friend of the last voyage, the 
mighty Norseman. 

**What is your name?" 

"Johann Nicanor Gustaffsen." 

"Where were you born?" 

"Stockholm." 

"How old are you?" 

"Thirty-two." 

"Where do you live?" 

"Ryder Street, Swansea.'* 

"Any advance?" 

"Yes." 

And so on with each of us. 

"Don't forget," says the clerk from the depths 
of a three-and-a-half-inch collar, "to be on the 
ship at nine o'clock to-morrow morning." And we 
troop out to make room for another crew, meet 
yet another coming to be paid off at the other 



90 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

counter, wish we were they, and eventually reach 
the ship. 

Strange scenes sometimes, in that shipping office, 
or, for that matter, in any shipping office. I shall 
not forget that forlorn little lad we had once engaged 
for mess-room steward at two pounds five a month, 
with his red little nose and the bullied look in his 
eyes. It was when he went up to sign, and answer 
the questions given above. What was his name.^* 
*' Christinas Hedge." All turned and stared at the 
snivelling urchin. Where was he born? "In a 
field." 

The walls, too, interest a man like me. There 
are notices in all the tongues of Europe on the walls — 
notices of sunken wrecks, of masters fined for sub- 
merging their loaded discs, of white lights in the 
China seas altered to green ones by the Celestial 
Government, of transport-medals awaiting their 
owners, of how to send money home from Salonika 
or Copenhagen or Yokohama or Singapore. Near 
the door, moreover, is a plain wooden money-box 
with no appeal for alms thereon — merely a printed 
slip pasted along the base of it: "There is sorrow on 
the sea." And often and often I have seen grey 
chief officers and beardless "fourths" drop their 
sixpences into the box, for the sake of that sorrow 
on the sea. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 91 

And now it is night — our last night ashore. The 
Second Engineer asks me to go up town with 
him. The Chief has gone to see his wife home 
to Cardiff, and George goes on watch at eight- 
bells. So for the last time I don a linen collar 
and shore clothes, and we go up town. We meet 
sundry youth from the ship-yard; they are going 
to that iridescent music-hall into which I plunged 
six weeks ago when we came in. We pay our six- 
pences for two hours' high-speed enjoyment, "early 
performance"; enjoyment being sold nowadays very 
much like electricity — at a high voltage but small 
cost per unit. Scarcely my sort, I fear, but what 
would you? I cannot be hypercritical on this our 
last night ashore. And so I strive to feel as if I 
were sorry to go away, as if parting were indeed that 
sweet sorrow I have heard it called, as if I really 
cared a scrap for the things they care for. True, 
I feel the parting from my friend, and it is no sweet 
sorrow either. But that is at Paddington, when the 
train moves, and our hands are gripped tightly — 
a faint foretaste of that last terror, when he or I shall 
pass away into the shadows and the other will be 
left alone for ever. It is when I ponder upon that 
scene that I realize what our friendship has become, 
that I realize how paltry every other familiar or 
even relative appears by comparison. Let me 



92 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

treasure this friendship carefully, healthfully, old 
friend, for, by my love of life, it is rare enough in 
these our modern times. 

I have been wondering why this is — I think it is 
money, or rather business. Have you noticed how 
business dehumanises men ? I count over in my mind 
dozens of men whom I know, men of age, experience, 
and wealth, who almost demand that I should envy 
them by the very way they walk the city streets. 
They are prosperous, they imagine. I, strolling 
idly through those same city streets, looking at the 
show, studying their faces, defied them, and said 
to myself, "You gentlemen are not human beings — 
you are business men." Not that I would tell them 
this; they would not understand, though they are 
guilty of occasional lucid intervals. They will ad- 
mit, in a superior tone, that business cuts them off 
from a great deal. But it is evident they intend stick- 
ing to the irrefutable logic of the bank-balance. For 
them there is no friendship like ours. They could 
not afford it, bless you. How are they to know that 
you won't "do" them or borrow of them? No, no. 
The world, for them, is a place where they have a 
chance of besting you and me, of getting more money 
than you or I, of "prospering," as they call it, at 
another's expense. 

If I say to one of these men, "I want no fortune; 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 93 

I have what I need now by working for it," he looks 
at me as though I were stark mad. If I say, to poor 
Sandy Jackson, for instance, who has only one lung 
and is mad on "getting more business" — if I say 
to him, "You advise me to go in for business on my 
own account, Sandy. Very good. What does that 
mean? It means that I must become dehumanisedy 
or fail. I must have no friends who are of no use to 
me. I must waste no time reading or writing or 
dreaming dreams. I must eat no dinners abroad 
which are not likely to bring in business. I must 
toil early and late, go on spare regimen, drink little, 
dress uncomfortably, live respectably — for what, 
Sandy ? For a few hundreds or thousands of pounds. 
May I let up then.? Oh, no, Sandy, that is the 
business man's mirage, that letting up. He never 
lets up until he is let down — into the tomb. It 
would be against his principles. Well, Sandy, I 
see you're at it and apparently killing yourself by 
it, but I wish to be excused. It isn't good enough. 
I want my friends, my books, my dreams most 
of all. Take your business; I'll to my dreams 
again. 

So, while we sit in the gaudy playhouse, I dream 
my dreams of the great books I want to write, the 
orations I want to deliver, the lessons I want to teach, 
and I wonder how long my time of probation will be. 



94 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

Strange that I should never make any allowance for 
the dangerous nature of my calling. This may be 
my last night ashore for ever. What of it? Well, 
it will be a nuisance to leave those books, lectures, 
and lessons to be written, given, and taught by 
somebody else; but I don't really mind. I only 
want to go along steadily to the end, and when that 
comes shake my friend by the hand and say "Fare- 
well." It is plain, is it not, that I am no business 
man? 

I am still dreaming when our noisy little crowd 
elbow their way out and pass up the street into a 
tavern. Here my friend the Second is known. He 
pats the fair barmaid on the cheeks, chucks the dark 
one under the chin, calls the landlady "old dear," 
and orders drinks in extenso. I am introduced to 
one and all, and another girl, neither dark nor fair, 
emerges from an inner room for my especial regard. 
We are invited within, and with glass in hand and 
girl on knee, we toast our coming voyage. One by 
one the girls are kissed; the landlady jocularly asks 
why she is left out, and a sense of justice makes me 
salute her chastely. You see, old man, this is the 
last night ashore. We bid them "good-bye," they 
wish us good luck, and we depart to our own place 
once more. The Second is silent. He has said 
good-bye to his girl — he hung back a moment as we 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 95 

left the tavern. And there is something burning in 
my brain, just behind the eyeballs. I have not said 
good-bye to my girl. Or rather I mean — but I 
cannot formulate to myself just what I do mean 
at the time. I only feel, as I turn in, that I ought to 
have told my friend all that happened when I met 
her, a month ago, and that, after all, nothing really 
matters, and the sooner I get away to sea again the 
better. 

XVII 

Cleared for sea. 

s.s Benvenuto, for S. Africa. 

It is ten-thirty this clear, cold December day; the 
sun shines on the turquoise patch of open Channel 
which I can see from the bridge where I am testing 
the whistle; the tide is rising; the last cases of general 
cargo are being lowered into Number Two Hold, 
and from all along the deck rise little jets of steam, for 
the Mate is already trying the windlass. Once more 
we are "cleared for sea." In an hour's time the tug 
ImplacabUy mingling her frenzied little yelp with our 
deeper note, will pull us out into the middle of the 
dock, then round, and slowly through the big gates, 
into the locks. The hatches are already on the after 
combings, and sailors are spreading the tarpaulin 



96 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

covers over them and battening down with the big 
Wood wedges, 

"Steam for eleven o'clock," said the Chief last 
night. Right! The gauges are trembling over the 
150 mark now — enough to get away with. "Open 
everything out, Mr. McAlnwick," says the Second 
as he strolls round for a last look before going on 
deck. I carry out the order, glance at the water- 
level in the boilers, and then go for'ard to see how 
many of my firemen are missing. They should all 
be here by now. No, two short still. Old Androv- 
sky rears himself up and points with the stem of 
his pipe at the quay. The ship has moved away, 
and the two men with sailors' bags and mat- 
tresses are watching us. They will get aboard in 
the locks. 

The Skipper is in uniform on the bridge, and the 
Mate is, as usual, in a hurry. The mooring winch 
is groaning horribly as she hauls on a cable running 
from the stern to the quay while the tug pulls our 
head slowly round. Right down to the centre of the 
loading disc now. The Second Mate rushes to the 
fiddle-top, and shouts for "more steam "^ — the winch 
has stuck — and a howl from below tells him that the 
donkeyman is doing his best. As I go below again 
the sharp clang of the telegraph strikes my ear — 
''Stand by." 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 97 

The steam is warming the engine-room, and there 
is, in the atmosphere down here, a pecuHar pungent 
smell, always present when getting away. It is, I 
suppose, the smell of steam, if steam has any smell. 
"Give 'er a turn, Mr. McAlnwick." The Chief 
looks down from the deck-door, and I answer "All 
right, sir." We are moving into the locks now, and 
as I start the little high-speed reversing engine the 
telegraph pointer moves round to "Slow ahead" 
with a sharp clang. "Ash-pit dampers off!" cries 
George the Fourth, and runs to close the drain-cocks. 
There is a sudden loud hammering as I open the 
throttle, and she moves away under her own steam. 
Then she sticks on a dead-centre, a point du mort, 
as the French mecaniciens say, and George rushes to 
open the intermediate valve, kicking open the water- 
service cock as he goes past it. At last she goes 
away, slow, solemn, and steamy, three pairs of eyes 
watching every link and bar for "trouble." "All 
right?" asks the Chief from above, and the Second, 
standing by the staircase, answers "All right, sir." 
Then "clang" goes the telegraph round to "Stop," 
and I close the throttle. "We're in the locks," says 
George, fiddhng with an oil-cup which is loose on 
the intermediate pressure rod. "We're in the locks, 
and we soon shall cross the bar." And as he busies 
himself with one thing and another he hums the tune 



98 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

which has swept over Swansea Hke some contagious 
disease of late: 

" When there isn't a girl about, 

You do feel lonely ! 
When there isn't a girl about 

To call your only ! 
You're absolutely on the shelf. 
Don't know what to do with yourself. 

When there isn't a girl about ! " 

"Said good-bye to her, Mac?" he asks, I nod 
evasively. He has been home to Sunderland since 
we got in, and I found him asleep on the gallery floor, 
with his head in the ash-pit, the night of his return. 
He is better now, and since I know he has brought 
back a photograph from the north, I am in hopes of 
his having fallen in love. {Clang ! Slow ahead.) 
It is high time, I think. His constitution won't 
stand everything, you know. And it seems such a 

pity for a fine young chap to {Clang ! Stop.) 

George is recordingt he bridge orders on the black- 
board on the bunker bulkhead, and I wonder 

{Clang/ Slow ahead.) A pause; then — Clang I 
FULL AHEAD. 

"Let her go away gradually, mister,'* says the 
Second as he goes round to have a look at the pumps. 
Cautiously the stop-valve is opened out, and the en- 
gines get into their sixty-two per-minute stride. The 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 99 

firemen are at it now, trimmers are flogging away the 
wedges from the bunker doors, and the funnel damper 
is full open. And then, and then — how shall I de- 
scribe the sensation of that first delicate rise and fall 
of the plates. I experience a feeling of buoyant fife 
under my feet! It means we are out at sea, that we 
have crossed the bar. The Chief and Second have 
gone to get washed for dinner, George is on deck 
shutting off steam and watching the steering engine 
for defects, and I am left alone below with a greaser. 
I experience a feeling of exultation as I watch my 
engines settle down for their seven-day run to the 
Canary Islands. How can I explain how beautiful 
they are? 

" j4ll things bright and beautiful. 
All creatures great and small. 
All things wise arid zuonderful. 

The Lord God made them all!" 

Yes, that is how I feel just now as I pace round and 

round, alert for a leaky joint or a slackened nut. 

The solemn music of the plunging rods is all the 

sweeter for that I have not heard it for six weeks. 

We are out at sea! 

I And now George comes down again, and I go on 

\ deck to get my dinner. We are crossing Swansea 

i Bay, among the brown-sailed trawlers and the in- 



loo AN OCEAN TRAMP 

coming steamships. The sun shines brightly on us 
as we bear away southward towards Lundy, and 
I stare out silently across the broad Channel, think- 
ing. Oh, my friend, stand by me now, in this my 
hour of need! How foolish! I am alone at sea, and 
my friend is in London, puzzHng over my behaviour 
to him. 

The cool breeze against my face arouses me. The 
mood of exultation in my engines, the mood of blank 
despair, both have passed, and I am, I hope, myself 
again. Once more "the kick o' the screw beneath 
us and the round blue seas outside." Once more the 
wandering fever is in my blood, and, as the winter's 
day fades away, I stand against the rail looking east- 
ward at the flashing lights, calmer than I have been 
since that night — a month ago. I am an ocean 
tramp once more, and count it life indeed. 

"And out at sea, behold the dock-lights die. 
And meet my mate, the wind that tramps the world." 



XVIII 

I HAVE been looking into some of my books, now that 
the sea is so calm and the weather so enchantingly 
fair. I find a pleasurable contrast in dipping into 
such volumes as Boswell's "Johnson," Goldsmith's 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP loi 

"Beau Nash," and Lady Montague's "Letters." 
The Hfe they depict is so different, the opinions 
they express so dissimilar from those I have 
myself gradually grown to affect. And what an 
amazing farrago is that same Boswell! Surely, if 
ever a book was written con amore, it is that one. 
Compare it with the "Life of Beau Nash." Each is 
the biography of a remarkable man, but what a differ- 
ence! In every line Goldsmith displays a certain 
forced interest. I do not know, but I am almost 
positive he cared very little for his subject; I feel that 
the work is only being carried on for the sake of gain. 
Regarded so, it is a masterly little Life. Two hun- 
dred small pages — Nash merits no more on the roll 
of fame. 

But the former, twelve hundred closely printed 
pages. No paltry little anecdote or incident, ger- 
mane or not, is too contemptible for him. The 
identity of some obscure school, the mastership of 
which Johnson never held, is argued about until one 
is weary of the thing. The illegible note, written for 
his own eye alone, is construed in a dozen ways, and 
judgment delivered as though the fate of empires hung 
thereon. The smug complaisance with which he 
cites some prayer or comment to illustrate his idol's 
religious orthodoxy would have angered me once — 
did anger me once — but out here, on the broad blue 



102 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

ocean, I smile at the toady, and marvel at the won- 
drous thing he has wrought. 

Pleasant, too, to turn the leaves of my Dryden, 
and glance through some of those admirably com- 
posed prefaces, those egotistical self-criticisms so full 
of literary pugnacity, in an age when pluck in a poet 
needed searching for. I often say to folk who de- 
plore Bernard Shaw's prefatory egotism that if they 
would read Dryden they would discover that Shaw 
is only up to his own masterly old game of imitating 
his predecessor's tactics. But Shaw is quite safe. 
He knows people do not read the literature of their 
own land nowadays. 

I had a laugh last evening all to myself when I 
noticed that, in a hasty re-arrangement of my book- 
shelves, Gorky stood shouldering old Chaucer I 
Could disparity go further? And yet each is a mas- 
ter of his craft, each does his work with skill — with 
"trade finish," as we say. And so it seemed to me 
that, after all, one might leave the "Romaunt of the 
Rose" side by side with "Three of Them," on condi- 
tion that each is read and re-read, if only for the 
workmanship. 

Cellini, too, draws me as regularly and irresistibly 
as the moon makes our tides. Here is richness. 
The breathless impetuosity of the whole narrative, 
the inconceivable truculence of the man, fascinates 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 103 

me, who am so different. When I looked at that 
"Perseus" in Florence, when I leaned over the medal- 
cases in South Kensington and stared hard at the 
work of his murderous hands, I felt awed and baffled. 
How could he do it — he with his dagger just with- 
drawn from some rival's shoulders, his lingers just 
unclasped from some enemy's windpipe? Then, 
again, the virile cheerfulness of the man! God is 
ever on his side, Justice is his guardian angel. And 
while musing upon him some few days back, I fell to 
wondering if I might not imitate him. I mean, why 
could not I take the Hfe of some such man (and I 
know one at least who could sit for the portrait), and 
write a fictitious autobiography in that truculent, 
bombastic, interesting style .f* I have the material, 
and I beheve I could do it. What do you think, old 
friend? It is already one of my plans for the future, 

' when I am done wandering. 

\ That last word reminds me of my Borrow. Who 
can describe the bewildering delight when one first 
plunges into "Lavengro" and the "Romany Rye"? 
To take them from the bookcase and carry them out 
to Barnet, where the Kingmaker fell, and read with 
the wind in your face and the Great North Road 
before your eyes — is that too much to ask of mine 
ancient Londoner? Believe me, the thing is worth 
doing. No man ever put so divine an optimism 



I04 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

into his books, so genuine a love of "nature." Says 
Mr. Petulengro: "There's night and day, brother, 
both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all 
sweet things; there's likewise the wind on the heath. 
Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?" 
One of the most precious memories of my younger 
manhood is brought back to me as I write those 
words. It was a Sunday afternoon in late autumn, 
in one of those unfrequented ways which slant off 
from the Great North Road beyond Hadley Heath, 
where the green turf bordered the brown road and 
the leaves covered the earth beneath the trees with 
a carpet of flaming cloth-of-gold. I had left my 
book and bicycle to one side, and, seated upon a 
low grey stone wall, I watched the sun go down. 
Behind me, across the intervening meadows, rose 
clouds of dust, redolent of waste gases, where thun- 
dered an ever-increasing traffic of swift vehicles. 
In front a vaporous mist was rising from the land; 
the shadows broadened, and the red western glow 
grew deeper, while in the middle distance a tiny 
child, clad in green cloak and little red hood, stood 
conning her Sunday story — a jewel of quiet colour 
in the gathering autumn twilight. And so, as I 
listened to the roar from the macadamed highway 
and looked out upon that evening glory, it was as 
though I heard, far oflF, the throbbing pulse of the 



I AN OCEAN TRAMP 105 

i 

i: great world's mighty hand, while I sat still in the 

I. heart of it. 

i "Life is very sweet, brother: who would wish to 

idie?" 



XIX 

Is ALL this too bookish for an ocean tramp? Alas! 
I fear I grow too cocksure of my literary attain- 
ments out here, with none to check me. It is in 
London where a man finds his true level in the book 
world, as Johnson shrewdly observed. In the even- 
ing, when we are gathered over the fire, and opinions 
fly across and rebound, when one hears bookmen 
talk of books, and painters talk of art — that is the 
time when I feel myself so unutterably insignificant. 

Often I have looked across at T , or G , or 

, someone I know even better than them, and 

I feel discouraged. You men have done things, 
while I — well, I talk about doing things, and try, 
feebly enough, to make my talking good; but to 

what end? T has his work in many a public 

building and sacred edifice; G has his books 

on our tables and in the circulating hbraries; and 
you have done things, too, in dramatic Hterature. 

Meanwhile I am an engine-driver on the high seas! 
I know my work is in the end as honourable and more 
useful than yours, but I cannot always keep back a 



io6 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

jealous feeling when I think of the years sliding by, 
and nothing done. Nothing ever finished, not even 
— but there! That chapter of my life is finished and 
done with, incomplete as the story will be always. 
Often and often, under the stars at midnight, I think 
that if she would stand by me, I could be nearer suc- 
cess — I could take hold of life and wrench away the 
difficulties of it. And then again comes a more 
valiant, manly mood. I say to myself, I will do 
something yet. I will reach the heights, and show 
her that one man at least can stand on his own feet. 
I will show her that she need have no need to be 
ashamed of him, though no carpet-knight, only an 
engine-driver. And I recall that brave song in the 
"Gay Pretenders": 

" / am not what she'd have me he, 
I am no courtier fair to see; 
And yet no other in the land, 
I swear, shall take my lady's hand !" 

Well, that is my high resolve sometimes, and I 
will try to keep it in front of me always, and so do 
something at last. 

Well, well, this is sad talk for the day before 
Christmas! Come away from books and trouble, 
out on deck, where there is a breeze. The mighty 
Norseman is ready to cut my hair, and is waiting 
abaft the engine-room under the awning. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 107 

It is the donkeyman's business, aboard this ship, 
to cut the officers' hair. A marvellous man, a good 
donkeyman. And this one of ours is multi-marvel- 
lous, for he can do anything. He speaks Swedish, 
Danish, Russian, German, and excellent English. 
He has been a blacksmith, butcher, fireman, greaser, 
tinsmith, copper-smelter, and now, endlich, enfin, 
at last, a donkeyman. His frame is gigantic, his 
strength prodigious. On his chest is a horrific 
picture of the Crucifixion in red, blue, and green 
tattoo. Between the Christ and the starboard thief 
is a great triangular scar of smooth, shiny skin. One 
of his colossal knees is livid with scars. He tells me 
the story Hke this, keeping time with the click of 
the scissors. 

**When I was a kid I was a wild devil. Why, I 
ran away with a circus that came to Stockholm, 
and my father he came after me and he nearly kill 
me. Then, one day, I had on — what you call 'em, 
mister.? — long shoes, eight, ten feet long — ah! yes, 
we call 'em ski. Well, I go to jump thirty, forty 
feet, and I am only twelve years old. The strap 
come off my foot and I have not time to shift my 
balance to the other foot, and I go over and over, like 
a stone. I come down on my knee, and there are 
beer-bottles on the rocks. The English and Ger- 
mans, they drink beer on the rocks — beautiful 



io8 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

Swedish beer, better than Lowenbrau, hein! Well, 
they take out of my knee fifty pieces of glass — you 
see the marks? And my chest it is smashed bad. 
They cut off three rib and look inside; this is where 
they look into my chest. All right! They put ribs 
back and box all up. Oh, I was a wild devil when 
I was a kid!" 

Such is Johann Nicanor Gustaffsen, with his huge 
strength, frescoed chest, and pasty face with the 
jolly blue eyes. I think the women like him, and, 
by the hammer of Thor! he can bend a bar of iron 
across his knee! 



XX 

It is Christmas Day, and I begin it with the clock 
as usual. George the Fourth punches me in the 
ribs, grunts, "Merry new Christmas, Mac," and 
vanishes. There is not a breath of air stirring. 
Through the sultry night air the stars burn brightly. 
A cluster of blurred lights on the horizon show me 
where a liner is creeping past us in the darkness — a 
ship passing in the night. Clad only in dungaree 
trousers and singlet, I go below, on watch. The 
windsail hangs limp and breathless, and the ther- 
mometer stands at 120° Fah. Christmas Day! 
Slowly in the hot air the hours drag on. One, 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 109 

two, three o'clock. Then, "one bell," No breeze 
yet. I finish up, score my log on the blackboard — 
Sea water 90°, discharge 116° — and call the Second. 
He is awake, panting in the hot oven of his berth. 
If 1 wish him a merry Christmas he will murder me. 
I slink below again, and have a sea bath. Even 
salt water at 90° Fah. is a boon after four hours in 
that inferno. 

A mug of cocoa — strange how hot cocoa cools one — 

j and I turn in. I hear the Skipper padding up and 
down in his sandals on the poop, clad only in py- 
jamas. At last, as the stars are paling, I fall asleep. 

' At seven o'clock I am aroused by the mess-room 
steward leaning over me, closing my ports. They 
are flooding the decks with sea-water to cool them, 

L and if my ports are open I am also flooded. 

[ Still no relief. There is a deathly quiet in the 

[ mess-room as we assembled to our Christmas break- 

! fast of bacon and eggs, coflPee, cocoa, and marmalade. 
Imagine such a menu in the tropics! The butter is 
liquid, and from each of us, clad in singlets and white 

|. ducks, the sweat streams. The day begins un- 
propitiously. John Thomas, the mess-room stew- 
ard, balancing himself on the top step of our com- 
panion-way with three cups of boiling cocoa in his 
hands, slips and thunders to the bottom. There is 

|l a chaotic mixture of scalded boy, broken cups, and 



no AN OCEAN TRAMP 

steam on the floor, and we giggle nervously in our 
Turkish bath. 

George the Fourth goes on watch, and we lie 
listlessly under our awning, praying for a breeze. 
On the face of the blazing vault there is not a single 
cloud, on the face of the waters not a ripple. The 
sea is a vast pond of paraffin. The hot gases from 
the funnel rise vertically, and the sun quivers behind 
them. The flaps of the windsail hang dead, the sides 
of the canvas tube have fallen in like the neck of a 
skinny old man. Slowly the sun mounts over our 
heads and the air grows hotter and hotter. From 
the galley come sounds of quacking, and a few feath- 
ers roll slowly past us. Now and then an agonized 
trimmer will stagger out of a bunker hatch into the 
open air, his half-naked body black with coal-dust 
and gleaming with sweat. The Mate, in a big straw 
hat, paces the bridge slowly. The cook emerges 
from the galley and hastens aft for provisions — they 
are preparing our Christmas dinner. Roast duck, 
green peas, new potatoes, plum pudding — and the 
temperature is 105° Fah. on deck. 

One bell. I rise, and go below to change for my 
watch — 12 to 4. 

*'Will you take any dinner, sir?" John Thomas 
rubs the sweat from his forehead and sets the soup 
on the table. I ponder on the madness of eating 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP in 

Christmas fare in that oven-hke mess-room, but 
sentiment wins, and I sit down with the others. 

"Hoondred an' twenty oonder t' win's'Ie," whis- 
pers George to me huskily. 

"What's the sea-water?" asks the Chief. 

"Eighty-nine, sir." 

We push the soup aside, and John Thomas brings 
in the roast ducks. How appetizing they would be 
at home! The Chief wrenches them apart in per- 
spiring silence, and we fall to. We peck at the food; 
the sweat drops from our faces into the plates, the 
utensils slide from our hands, and so we make the 
best of it. But when the pudding arrives our cour- 
age fails us. We cannot face plum pudding, senti- 
ment or no sentiment. We gulp down some lime- 
juice and stagger away like dying men — I to four 
hours' purgatory below. 

Slowly (oh, so slov^ly!) the time drags on. The 
greaser draws his tattooed arm across his eyes and 
whispers, with the triumph of a lost soul bragging 
of the Circle of Fire, that he has known it " 'otter'n 
this in the Red Sea, sir." He is an entertaining man. 
Often I hear tales from the wide world of waters from 
his Hps. This is his last voyage, he tells me. He is 
going "shore donkeyman" in future — what you call 
longshoreman. His wife has a nice little business in 
Neath now, and "she wants 'im 'ome." Have I 



112 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

noticed how that high-press guide is leaking ? Should 
he tighten up the tap-bolts in the bottom plate? I 
dissent, because one cannot reach them safely while 
she is running. It is only a trifle; better let it go. 
He acquiesces doubtfully, and resumes greasing. 
And the hours drift by. 

At four o'clock the Second reheves me, looking 
reproachfully at the slackened windsail. Still no 
breeze. And the greaser, who does not go off till 
six o'clock, observes, "Oh, wot a — 'appy Christmas!" 
Which would be profane if the temperature were 
lower. 

I change into white ducks again and saunter up 
to the bridge to talk to my friend the Mate. If I 
were to paraphrase Johnson's burst of energy, I 
should say, "Sir, I love the Mate!" 

"Merry Christmas, Mr. McAlnwick!" he shouts 
cheerfully from the upper bridge, and a chorus of 
yelping dogs joyfully take up the cry. They are the 
"Old Man's," but they follow the Mate up and down 
until they drop with fatigue. Black silky spaniel, 
rough-red Irish terrier, black and grey badger-toed 
Scotch half-breed, nameless mongrel — they all love 
the Mate. "Come here," he says, and I chmb up 
to his level. 

"The Old Man had a letter this mornin'," he says. 

"Eh-f"' I remark blankly. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 113 

"Ah! His wife gave it me before we sailed an' 
I left it on his table this mornin' ! Says he, at break- 
fast, 'Pshaw!' says he, 'it's a waste o' paper.'" 

"Mr. Honna," I say, "perhaps he'll be sorry for 
saying that, eh?" 

"He will, he will — some day, Mr. Mac," and he 
walks up and down the bridge for a bit, smoking the 
pipe his children gave him for a present last Christ- 
mas. I ask him: 

"When shall we strike the trade wind, Mr. 
Honna?" 

"Soon, soon. 'T ought to be here in the morn- 
mg. 

I climb down again, and sniff eagerly for the first 
beginnings of a breeze. Nothing, unless you are 
optimistic and Hke to stare at a brown streak away 
southward, between sky and sea. 

I reach the engineers' awning aft of the engine- 
room, and see the Chief in his chair, the Fourth in 
his hammock, and the Second just come up for tea. 
I open my mouth and speak, when the regular throb 
of the engines is broken by a scream. Like a flash 
each one springs to his feet and looks at the others. 
The regular throb goes on as before, and George 
laughs, but the Second disappears through the 
door, I following. I shall not easily forget that 
scream. 



114 ^N OCEAN TRAMP 

Half-way down, a fireman, his face blanching under 
the coal-dust and sweat, meets us. 

"What's up?" snaps the Second. 

"Donkeyman, sir. In the crankpit!" He plunges 
downward again, and we do the same. Down into 
the fierce oily heat illuminated by the electrics in 
front of each engine. The second puts two fingers 
in his mouth and whistles shrilly to those above. 
And then we fall to work. The telegraph is flung 
over to "Stop," the throttle is closed, ashpit damper 
put on, and the regular throb slackens, hesitates, 
stops. With a dexterous flick of the reversing en- 
gine the Second catches the high-press engine on the 
stop centre and locks her there. And then we look. 

Far better for him, poor lad, if he had taken my 
tip and left those tap-bolts to leak. The Second 
says "Hand-lamp," and I give him one. People 
are coming down the stairs in numbers now, and the 
Chief rushes up to us, looks down, and turns away 
sickened. The ponderous cranks have blood dashed 
across them, the rod is streaked and lathered with it. 
From the bottom of the pit comes no sound, no move- 
ment. Lying on the plates is the spanner which 
must have spun from his hand as he fell to destruc- 
tion. 

"Now then, how many more?" snarls the Second. 
Sweat streams from his face as he pushes the intrud- 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 115 

ers away and lifts a man-hole plate in the platform. 
I seize the hand-lamp and get down on to the tank, 
and the Second follows. It is not pleasant, under- 
stand, down there, where bilge collects and rats run 
riot, and grease is rolled into filthy black balls, and 
the stench is intolerable. I push on towards the pit. 



A full moon, blood-red and enormous, hangs just 
above the eastern sky-line. In the west still burns 
the glow of the vanishing sun, and the pale sky 
is twinkling with innumerable stars. The regular 
throb of the engines drives the ship forward again, 
a sailor is hauling down the red ensign from the poop, 
and another moves to and fro, silhouetted against 
the southern sky, on the foc'sle-head. Just ahead 
of the bridge two more sailors sit busily sewing. The 
Old Man stands by the chart-house door talking 
to the Mate. The dogs lie quietly on the lower 
deck, their heads between their paws. 

In the after-hatch, covered by the flag, lies that 
which is about to be committed to the deep. 

The red glow fades from the west, and the moon 
swings upward, flooding the sea with silver Hght. 
Away southward lies a black streak on the sky-line 
and the windsail flickers a little. The two sailors 
have finished sewing, and go aft. A fireman breaks 



ii6 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

the deck silence as he hoists two firebars up from 
the for'ard stokehold and carries them aft. Up 
on the poop, under the awning, the Second Mate has 
removed the hand-rails on the starboard quarter, 
and the carpenter is lashing some hatches in an in- 
clined position. 

We by the engine-room door are silent, for there 
is nothing to say. We wait for the Stand by bell in 
silence. A heavy footfall, and the Skipper, his 
bronzed face hard-drawn, his snowy hair uncovered, 
passes us. I think, even now, he is sorry for that 
sneer at his wife's little trick. He is going to get the 
Prayer Book that lies close to his revolver in his chest. 

George and I go below and make all ready. I 
think the Second is glad of our company, in the ter- 
rible heat. We potter about in silence: then "Stand 
by — Half — Slow — Stop." A few minutes' swift toil, 
a hurried wash, and we climb up on deck again into 
the moonlight. A white, silent world of waters is 
about us as we join the crew going aft to the poop. 
The awning has been partly folded back, and we 
see the Skipper resting his book on the tiller-gear, 
while the Steward stands by with a lantern. I look 
curiously into the faces I know so well, seeking, in the 
presence of death, a little more knowledge of life. I 
look at the Skipper, with his white hair and fierce 
moustache gleaming in the silver radiance of the 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 117 

moon, his hands fumbhng with the leaves of the 
book. I look at the Chief, fidgeting about in the 
rear, meeting no one's eye, his mouth working ner- 
vously. I look at George the Fourth; he is staring 
like a schoolboy at the flag-covered thing on the 
hatch, with the firebars lashed to its sides. And then 
the silence is broken by the harsh, unsteady voice: 

*'/ am the resurrection and the life.'' 

The tension is almost unbearable now. We have 
not been educated to this. We are like soldiers 
suddenly flung into the face of the enemy. 

*' fFe therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned 
into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the 
body {when the sea shall give up her dead), and the life 
of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; 
who at his coming shall change our vile body that it 
may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty 
working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to 
himself." 

A pause, and he closes the book. Two of the men 
quietly slacken the ropes which hold the body in 
position, another pulls off' the flag, and the dark mass 
on the planks plunges downward into the oily sea. 
Another pause, while I picture it rushing "down to 
the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white 
sea-snakes are," and the Chief motions furtively 
with his fingers. 



ii8 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

In a few minutes we are under way. 



It is eight bells, midnight, once more. The sky 
to the southward is a jet-black mass of clouds, and 
the windsail is yawing in a strong, cool breeze. Away 
to the westward the moon still throws her glory over 
the face of the waters and I go below, thinking of 
the night coming, when no man shall work. 

And so ends our Christmas Day. 

XXI 

It is Sunday, and I lie under the awning by the 
engine-room door, lazily reading "Faust." There is a 
speck on the sky-line — the mail boat, bringing a 
letter from my friend. I look round at the translu- 
cent opal of the bay, the glittering white of the surf on 
the reef, the downward swoop on an albatross, and I 
listen to the dull roar of the breakers, to the solemn 
tang-tang of the bell-buoy on the bar, and the com- 
plaisant " ah-ha-a-a" of some argumentative penguin. 
Even the drab-coloured African hills in the distance, 
and the corrugated Catholic church (shipped in 
sections) with the sun blazing on its windows, are 
beautiful to me to-day, for I am not of those who 
think religion is ugly because it is corrugated, or that 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 119 

hills are repulsive because they are not in the guide- 
book. I am at peace, and so are the rest. My 
friend the Mate is fishing, but that, of course, is 
trite; the Mate is always fishing. I fancy the cod 
nudge each other and wink when they see his old 
face looking down into those opalescent depths, and 
watch him feeling at his lines for a bite. How they 
must have joked together this morning when he 
gave a shout and called for help, for he could not 
Hft the line! We all responded to the call, and the 
line came up slowly. "Must be a whopper," mut- 
tered the Mate, and refused my callous suggestion 
that it was a coal-bag which had got entangled in the 
hook. At last, after an eternity of hauling, came up 
part of an iron bedstead, dropped from some steamer 
in the long ago. But the true fisherman has re- 
serves of philosophy to cope with such slings and 
arrows of outrageous fortune. 

Meanwhile the speck has enlarged itself into a blot 
with a tag above it and some cotton-woolly smoke. 
" 'Tis the Nautilas," observes the Mate, and he calls 
it "Naughty Lass" with hibernian unconsciousness 
of his own humour. I wonder, now, why it is that 
we sailor men invariably display such frantic feminine 
interest when another craft heaves in sight. The 
most contemptible fishing boat in the Bay of Biscay, 
when she appears on the horizon, receives the notice 



I20 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

of all hands — the old as well as the young. And when 
we pass a sister ship, the Aretino or the Cosimo or 
the Angela, in mid-ocean, we talk about her and 
criticise her, and rake out her past history, for days. 
I sometimes think, from hints the Mate drops, that 
our own Benvenuto has a past, a St. John's Wood 
past I mean, not a Haymarket past. But he will 
have no talk by others against the ship. "What's 
the matter with the ship t " he will shout. *' Damn it 
all, I like the ship! She's a good old ship, an' I glory 
in her ! " So we talk scandal about the others instead. 
Here, on the ragged edge of the Empire, things are 
managed expeditiously by the authorities. Scarcely 
an hour after the Nautilas has dropped her pick 
the tugboat comes out again and flings us our mail. 
Bosun and donkeyman trudge aft and take the letters 
for the foc'sle, the mess-room steward deposits a 
letter in my lap, and I think of my friend. At this 
moment he is engaged in repartee with the house- 
keeper as she lays the table for tea. The heavy 
twilight is settling down over the river outside; 
lovers are pacing the walk as they return from their 
Sunday tramp. Possibly, too, that fantastic scene 
which he has described to me is now enacting. He is 
at the piano; the housekeeper, in tears, is on her 
knees beside him, and they raise their melodious 
voices **for those in peril on the sea." How afi^ecting, 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 121 

for one to be so remembered! I thank them both 
with all my heart. 

And now he tells me that his play goes well, and 
I am glad. It will indeed be a red-letter day when 
I pay my shilling and climb into the gallery to see 
his work. No, I shall not criticise. Probably I 
shall hardly listen. I shall be thinking many 
thoughts, dreaming dreams, feeling simply very 
glad and very proud. 

I sympathise always with his struggles with his 
personnel, but I think, though, he hardly allows 
enough for the point of view. These actors and 
actresses are not hterary. (They should be, I know.) 
They look at an author's work as a man looks at the 
universe — a small part at a time. That trite old 
paradox that, to the actor, the part is greater than 
the whole, should never be forgotten. Remember, 
too, how "touchy," as he calls it, they must be, in 
the nature of things. Their touchiness, their affecta- 
tion, their lack of culture — all are inherent in them. 
Their success is always immediate, using the word in 
its literal sense as a metaphysician would use it; 
the author's success is mediate, through time and 
trial. So one should not be discouraged because 
they fail to appreciate one's efforts to give them the 
atmosphere of the period. They will get the atmos- 
phere intuitively, or not at all. 



122 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

He complains of "loss of time," "thankless task," 
"inefficiency," and the like. Now, I think that is 
grumbling without cause. Take my own case, for 
example. I have no problems of dramatic art to 
wrestle with, only the problem of coal consumption. 
But it is ultimately the same thing, i.e., energy. My 
friend mourns the shameful loss of energy incident 
to the production of a decent presentment of his 
dramatic conception. I, as an engineer, mourn over 
the hideous loss of coal incidental to the propulsion 
of the ship. The loss in his case, I suppose, is incal- 
culable: in mine it is nearly seventy per cent. Think 
of it for a moment. The Lusitania s furnaces con- 
sume one thousand tons of coal per day, seven hun- 
dred of which are, in all probability, lost in the in- 
efficiency of the steam-engine as a prime mover. It 
runs through the whole of our life, my friend ! Waste, 
waste, waste! What we call the perfect cycle, 
the conversion of energy into heat and heat into 
energy, cannot, in practice, be accomplished without 
loss. What may interest you still more is that we 
cannot, even in theory, calculate on no loss whatever 
in the progress of the cycle, and by this same "en- 
tropy loss," as we call it, some of our more reckless 
physicists foresee the running down of the great 
universe-machine some day, and so eliminating both 
plays and steam-engines from the problem altogether. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 123 

But this is my point. Prodigious loss is the law of 
nature which she imposes both on artist and artisan. 
Indeed, artist and artisan have their reason of being 
in that loss, as I think you will admit. 

Again, history will corroborate my contention as 
to the catholicity of this loss. Imagine the French 
Revolution, the Lutheran Reformation, the "Cath- 
olic" Reaction, and the like, to be revolutions of the 
vast human engine. Consider then the loss of power. 
Consider the impulse, the enormous impulse, ap- 
plied to the piston, and then look at the result. 
What losses in leakages, in cooled enthusiasms, in 
friction-heat, in (pardon the ludicrous analogy) 
waste gases! Think, too, of the loss involved in 
unbalanced minds, as in unbalanced engines, one 
mass of bigoted inertia retarding another mass! 
Oh, my friend, my friend, you talk of "losses" as 
though you playwrights had a monopoly of it. Ask 
men of all trades, of all faiths, and they will give 
you, in their answers, increased knowledge of human 
life. 

Such, at least, is my method — digging into the 
hearts of men. Take, for instance, my friend the 
Second Officer. A tall, lean young man, with an 
iron jaw under his brown beard. I began to talk 
to him one evening because he said he never had 
letters from home. He had a sister, he told me, but 



124 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

there was no joy in the telhng. "We don't hit it 
off," he observed grimly, and I smiled. He has no 
sweetheart, loves nothing but dogs. How he loves 
dogs! He has two at his heels all day long. He 
loves them almost as much as dogs love the Chief 
Officer, which is to distraction. He will take the 
solemn English terrier up on his knee and give me a 
lecture thereon. This same pup, I learn, is "low" — 
look at his nose! He is in bad health — just feel his 
back teeth! Saucy? Yes, certainly, but not a 
thoroughbred hair on him. He has worms, too, I 
understand, somewhere inside, and on several oc- 
casions during the voyage his bowels needed atten- 
tion. I, in my utter ignorance of dog-lore, begin to 
marvel that the animal holds together at all under 
the stress of these deficiencies. Perhaps the dirt 
which he collects by rolling about on deck affords 
a protective covering. Once a week, however, his 
lord and master divests him of even this shadowy 
defence, and he emerges from a bucket, clean, soapy 
and coughing violently. In all probability he re- 
joices in consumption as well. 

The Second Officer, I say, teaches me philosophy. 
He has had a hard life, I think. By sheer industry 
he has risen from common sailor to his present berth. 
I say "sheer" because it seems to me that when a 
man has no friends or relations who care to write 



' I 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 125 

to him, the way of Hfe must be very steep indeed. 
I was surprised, though, to learn of his loneHness. 
Had he, then, no kindly light to lead him on? Un- 
consciously he answered me. Would I come down 
below and have something to drink? With pleasure; 
and so we went. The last time I had been in that 
room was when his predecessor, the little man with 
four children and a house of his own, had extended 
hospitality to me. It is not a pleasant room. A 
spare bunk full of canvas bolts, cordage, and other 
stores, make it untidy; and the Steward's stores are 
just behind the after bulkhead, so that it smells 
like a ship-chandler's warehouse. Well, we sit 
down, and the whiskey passes. We light cigars 
(magnificent Campania Generals at three farthings 
each), and then he ferrets about in his locker. I 
look at the pictures. Almanack issued by a rope- 
maker in Manchester; photo of an Irish terrier, legs 
wide part, tail at an angle of forty-five to the rest 
of him; photo of Scotch terrier, short legs, fat body, 
ears like a donkey's; photo of the officers of s.s. 
Timbuctoo, in full uniform, my friend among them, 
taken on the upper deck, bulldog in the foreground. 
By this time the Second Officer has exhumed an 
oblong wooden case containing a worn violin. Ah! 
I have his secret. He holds it like a baby, and plucks 
at the strings. Then he plays. 



126 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

Well, he knows, by instinct I imagine, that I care 
nothing for music, as music. So when I ask for 
hymn-tunes, he smiles soberly and complies. I 
hear my favourites to my heart's content — "Hark, 
Hark, My Soul," "Weary of Earth," "Abide With 
Me," and "Thou Knowest, Lord." How glad they 
must be who believe these words ! The red sun was 
flooding the room with his last flaming signal as the 
man played: 

"Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; 
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide, 
When other helpers fail, and comforts flee, 
Help of the helpless, abide with me !" 

Yes, mon ami, all men know of that tremendous 
loss inherent in all their labours. And it is, I think, 
to balance that loss that they have invented religion. 



xxn 

It has suddenly struck me that there are many im- 
portant things to be found by considering the cheap 
literature which floods the English and American 
publics week by week and month by month, I am 
afraid that, when at home in Chelsea, where even 
the idlers read Swinburne and Lord de Tabley, I 
had grown accustomed to the stilted point of view, 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 127 

calling novelettes "trashy" and beneath an intel- 
lectual man's consideration. Well, since this par- 
ticular trash forms the staple brain food in the Mer- 
cantile Marine, I must needs look into it more closely. 
With results. 

There is a question of bulk and output. This is 
appalling to a laborious writer, a student or a thinker. 
Week by week there pours forth an unending deluge 
of love fiction, and week by week this deluge is ab- 
sorbed into the systems of millions of human beings. 
We speak glibly of the world-wide fame of some 
classic, when, in point of fact, the people familiar 
with that classic are isolated specks in the vast, 
solid mass to whom some novelettist is a household 
god. The classic will have, say, one votary in the 
family, the novelettist will capture the family en bloc. 
An engineer will receive a cargo of novelettes, all of 
which have been digested, or even feverishly devoured, 
by his mother, wife, or sisters. He will pass them 
on to the Steward, who will read them and give them 
to the sailors and firemen. And this obtains in 
every ship wherever the English language is spoken. 
What classic can claim a public that does not seem 
microscopic compared to this? 

I cannot but observe, too, that Miss Anonyme 
often writes exceedingly well. No extraneous va- 
pourings are admitted, and the plot is steadily de- 



128 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

veloped to its inevitable conclusion of "happy ever 
after." The metaphors are somewhat stereotyped, 
and quotations from Tennyson are awkwardly 
handled, but — what would you for a penny? John- 
son's explanation — that they write well in order to 
be paid well — is correct. Miss Anonyme knows 
her "market," and she writes for it as well as can 
be expected under the circumstances. 

A point worth noting is that this talk about 
"pernicious literature" is not sincere. Literature 
cannot be pernicious in itself. At the present time 
people can get exactly what they desire, because the 
question of price does not arise. The finest works 
are to be had at every free library, and for a few 
pence at every book-shop, and the public carefully 
avoids them. Novels containing chapter after chap- 
ter of neurotic aphrodisiacs and pornography mas- 
querading as literature are priced at "a shilling 
net," and are avidly purchased and read by the 
simple, God-fearing, sea-faring man. 

There is, of course, a tragic side to this question. 
I mean that, after all, a sublime simplicity of mind 
is a necessary predicate to the acceptance of this 
"cheap" fiction. "J penn'orth o' loove," George 
the Fourth calls a novelette, and there's something 
very grim to me in that phrase also. 

I have already noted the "passionate love of 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 129 

music" in the heroes and heroines of these stories. 
I made notes, and, in ten consecutive tales, one or 
more of the characters **was a passionate lover of 
music." I do not complain against the genius whose 
heroine elopes with a clean-shaven villain to Brittany 
and is married in a Gothic church with frescoed 
chapels. Neither do I any longer cry out when I 
read that **the light that never was lay over the 
land." I am grown callous with a course of light 
fiction such as I have never taken before. And I 
hope I shall not be misunderstood and numbered 
with the prigs when I say that never did literature 
seem to me more lovely and alluring than when I 
had finished my task and had opened my "Faust" 
once more, feeling the magic of the master beckoning 
"to far-off shores with smiles from other skies." 

What we clearly comprehend we can clearly express. 
That, I think, is Boileau, though I cannot remember 
where I read it. The bafHing thing about this fiction 
is that it expresses nothing, and therefore is not 
really a part of literature. The features of my col- 
leagues when absorbing a first-rate soporific of this 
nature remind me of the symptoms of catalepsy 
enumerated in a treatise of forensic medicine which 
I once read. The influence is even physical. It 
is generally associated with a recumbent position, 
repeated yawning, and excessive languor. Loss of 



I30 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

memory, too, is only one of the consequences of 
reading a dozen novelettes in a week's run. 

There is another possibility. I must not forget 
that in one point I found myself in error. In the 
case especially of engineers, this intellectual drug- 
taking has no eflPect upon their interest in professional 
literature. When George the Fourth goes up for his 
"tickut" he will be as keen about the theory of 
steam and the latest researches in salinometry as 
any of the aristocratic young gentlemen who haunt 
the precincts of Great George Street and Storeys 
Gate. This leads me to imagine that in the future 
there will be a vast mass of highly trained mechani- 
cians to whom literature will be non-existent, but 
whose acquaintance with written technics will be 
enormous. Like our scientific men, perhaps. I am 
uneasy at the prospect, because this conception of 
uncultured omniscience, the calm eyes of him shining 
with the pride of Government-stamped knowledge, 
is inseparable from an utter lack of reverence for 
women. Neither Antony nor Pericles, but Alcibiades 
is his classical prototype. And so the fiction with 
which he will pass the time between labour and sleep 
will have none of the subtlety of Meredith, none of 
the delicate artistry of Flaubert, but rather the 
fluent obviousness of Guy Boothby, stripped as bare 
as possible of sex romance. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 131 

I am anxious to convince myself of all this, be- 
cause I want so much to divorce this tremendous 
flood of machine-made writing from genuine literary 
activity. That, too, will evolve and evolve and 
evolve again; but with such a theme I am not genius 
enough to cope. 

XXIII 

I AM grown tired of books. It is a fact that pro- 
tracted manual toil strikes a shrewd blow at one's 
capacity for thought, and at times I turn from the 
fierce intellectual life with a weariness I never knew 
in the old days. How my friend would smile at such 
a confession. I, who have thumped the supper- 
table until three in the morning, until our eyelids 
were leaden with fatigue, growing weary of the strife ! 
Yet it is sometimes true. 

After all, though, my real study nowadays is on 
deck and below, where Shakespeare and the musical 
glasses are beyond the sky-line, and one can talk to 
men who have never in their lives speculated upon 
life, have never imagined that life could possibly 
be arraigned and called in question, or that morality 
could ever be anything but "givin' the girl her lines, 
like a man." My friend the Mate is a compendium 
of humanism, the Chief provides me with curious 
researches in natural history. Even the Cook, with 



132 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

whom I have been conversing, presents new phases of 
Hfe to me, and brings me into touch with the poor, 
the ignorant, and the prohfic. The poor whom zve 
know at home are only poor in purse. These men 
are poor in everything save courage and the power 
to propagate their kind. The Cook has received a 
letter from his sister-in-law to the effect that he is 
now the father of twins, and he looks at me and 
smiles grimly. Under the pretence of obtaining hot 
water for shaving, I am admitted to his sanctum 
sanctorum abaft the funnel, and we talk. It is 
hardly necessary to say that the Malthusian doctrine 
receives cordial approbation from my friend the 
Cook, when I have expounded it to him. 

"Certainly, Mr. McAlnwick," he observes, "but 
'ow are you goin' to start?" 

"You see," I reply, "it isn't a question of starting, 
but a question of stopping." 

"Well," he says stolidly, rolling a cigarette, " 'ow 
are you goin' to start stoppin'?" 

"You," I answer, "might have dispensed with 
these twins." 

"Lord love yer, mister, I can dispense with 'em 
easy enough. That's not the question. The ques- 
tion is, 'ow am I to feed 'em, now I've got 'em.? 
An' 'ow am I to avoid 'em, me bein' a man, mind, 
an' not a lump o' dry wood?" 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 133 

Like all theorists, I am hard put for an answer. I 
look round me, and watch my interlocutor preparing 
to make bread. There is a mammoth pan on the 
bench beside me containing a coast-line of flour with 
a lake of water in the middle. Cook is opening the 
yeast-jar, an expression of serious intent on his face. 
Some cooks sing when they make bread; the Scotch- 
man I told you of in a previous letter invariably 
trilled "Stop yer ticklin', Jock," and his bread was 
invariably below par. But this cook does not warble. 
He only releases the stopper with a crack like a 
gun-shot, flings the liquid "doughshifter" over the 
lake in a devastating shower, and commences to 
knead, swearing softly. Anon the exorcism changes 
to a noise like that affected by ostlers as they tend 
their charges, and the lake has become a parchment- 
coloured morass. For five pounds a month this man 
toils from four a.m. to eight p. m., and his wife can 
find nothing better to do than present him with 
twins ! 

I look into the glowing fire and think. 

I feel this is delicate ground, even allowing for the 
natural warmth of a man who has twins, so I am 
' silent. 

"Sometimes," Cook continues, growing pensive as 
the dough grows stiff", "sometimes I feel as though 
I could jump over the side with a ' 'ere goes nothink' 



134 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

and a bit of fire-bar in me 'ip-pocket. Same blasted 
work, day after day. Monday curry an' rice, fresh 
meat an' two veg., ' 'arriet lane' and spuds. Toos- 
day, salt meat ditto. Wednesday, bully soup an' 
pastry. Thursday, similar. Friday, kill a pig an' 
clean the galley. Sat'day, ' 'arriet lane' an' spuds, 
fresh meat, two veg., an' tart. Sunday, similar 
with eggs an' bacon aft. What good do it do? 
Who's the better for it all? Not me. "Ere goes 
nothink!'" 

He stabs the fire savagely through a rivet-hole in 
the door, and pushes his cauldrons about. To one 
who knows Cook all this is merely the safety-valve 
lifting. The ceaseless grind tells on the hardest 
soul, and you behold the result. In an hour or so 
he will be smiling again, and telling me how nearly 
he married a laundryman's daughter in Tooley 
Street, a favourite topic which he tries to invest with 
pathos. It appears that, after bidding the fair 
blanchisseuse good-night, he chanced one evening to 
take a walk up and down Liverpool Street, where he 
fell into conversation with a girl of prepossessing 
appearance. Quite oblivious of the fact that Ma- 
demoiselle Soap-Suds had followed him, **just to see 
if he was as simple as he looked," he enjoyed himself 
immensely for some twenty minutes, and then ran 
right into her. He assures me he was " 'orror-struck." 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 135 

Like a man, he admitted that he was conversing 
with "that — that there.'* I always Hke this part 
of the tale. His confession seems to him to have been 
the uttermost depths of mortal self-abnegation. 
Alas, the heiress of Soap-Suds Senior had no apprecia- 
tion of the queenly attribute of forgiveness. She 
boxed his ears, and he never saw her again. "She 
was alius a spiteful cat," he observes pensively; "so 
p'raps the wash 'us 'ud ha' been dear at the price. 
Still, it was a nice little business, an' no kid." 

As I raise my pot of shaving-water a huge head 
and shoulders fill up the upper half of the galley 
doorway. The mighty Norseman has come for some 
"crawfish legs." Like Mr. Peggotty and the Crus- 
tacea he desires to consume, he has gone into hot 
water very black, and emerges very red. His flannel 
shirt only partially drapes his illuminated chest — I 
see the livid scar plainly. He beams upon me, and 
asks for a match. 

"Well, Donkey," says Cook, " 'ow goes it?" 
"Donkey" is the mighty Norseman's professional 
title aboard ship. 

"Aw reet, mon," says he with the fiendish aptitude 
of his race for idiom. "How is the Kuck?" 

"Oh, splendid. Stand out o' the way, and let me 
make thy daily bread." 

"Daily!" screams the Donkeyman. "Tell that 



136 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

to the marines. I have one loaf soP bread three 
times a week, an' there are seven days to a week. 
Daily! Tell that " 

"Find another ship, me man, find another ship 
if the Benvenuto don't suit!" And the Mate passes 
on to the chart-house, where are many dogs. 

"Ay, will I, when we get to Swansea," says the 
Donkeyman to me, beaming. "There are more 
ships than parish churches, eh? Mister, I want to 
speak to you. Come out here." I go outside in 
the moonlight, and the mighty Norseman takes hold 
of the second button of my patrol-jacket. 

"Well, Donkey.?" 

"I 'ave had a letter from Marianna," he whispers. 

"Ah! And so she is " 

"She is Marianna, always Marianna now. A 
good letter — two and a half page. See, in German, 
mister. She write it very well, Marianna." And 
I behold a letter in German script. 

Tastes differ. I am compelled to believe that 
passion can flow even through German script — aye, 
when it is written by a Swedish maiden of uncertain 
caligraphy. Heavenly powers! I turn the sheet 
to the light from the galley. Surely no mortal can 
decipher such a farrago of alphabetical obscurity. 
And I do so want to know what Marianna says for 
herself. I love Marianna, for the mighty Norseman 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 137 

says she is small and dainty, and her eyes are grey, 
and — and — well, the resemblance doesn't end there; 
so when I tell my friend, he may laugh as much as 
he pleases. But there had been a quarrel (in German 
script), and the mighty Norseman had grown might- 
ily misogynistic. His jolly pasty face had been as 
long as my arm most of the way out, and his senti- 
ments, confided to me each day at seven bells, were 
discourteous to the sex. But now, behold the cloud 
lifted: German script has undone its own villainy, 
and Johann Nicanor GustafFsen beams. 

"I will go 'ome this time, mister," he says, folding 
up the reconciling hieroglyphics. 

"How, Donkey — work it?" 

"Not much, you bet. I go to London and take 
a Swedish boat from Royal Albert Docks to Gothen- 
burg, train from Gothenburg to Marianna. Seven- 
teen knots quadruple twin screw. I will be a passen- 
ger for one quid." 

"Donkey, did you ever hear of Ibsen — Henrik 
Ibsen?" 

" Ibsen ? Noa. What ship is he Chief of, mister ?" 

"A ship that passes in the night. Donkey." 

"What's that, mister?'* 

How small a thing is literary fame, after all I 
When one considers the density of the human at^ 
mosphere, the darkness in which the millions live, 



138 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

is not Ibsen to them a ship passing in the night indeed, 
a mysterious Hght afar off, voyaging they know 
not where? Perhaps that is what I meant. 

"He wrote plays, Donkey — Schauspielschreiber, 
you know." 

"Oa! Ich hatte nicht daran gedacht ! 'Ave you 
a bit of paper and envelope, mister, please? I will 
write to Marianna." 

"Give her my love. Donkey." 

"Oh-a-yes, please! I'll watch it! What? You 
cut me out?" A rumbling laugh comes up from 
that mighty chest, he beams upon me, and plunges 
into the galley for his crawfish legs. 

XXIV 

Mug of hot water in hand, I pick my way aft among 
the derrick chains, and descend to my room. Have I 
yet described it? Nine feet six by seven wide by 
seven high. At the for'ard end a bunk overtopped 
by two ports looking out upon the main deck. At 
the after end a settee over which is my bookcase. 
A chest of drawers, a shelf, a mirror, a framed photo- 
graph, a bottle-rack, and a shaving-strop adorn the 
starboard bulkhead. A door, placed midway in the 
opposite side, is hung with many clothes. A cur- 
tain screens my slumbers, and a ventilator in the 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 139 

ceiling chills my toes when turned to the wind. 
Ceiling and walls are painted dead white, with red 
wainscotting round the settee. Two engravings grace 
the only vacant spots on my walls — one a wild piece 
of wood and moorland, the road shining white after 
a late-autumn rain, with a gypsy van showing sharp 
against the lowering sky; the other a wintry lane with 
a waggon labouring in the snow. A patrol-jacket 
and a uniform cap hang over a pillow-case half full 
of dirty clothes. Such is my home at sea. 

Look round while I shave. Quite possibly some 
may wonder that I should affect such commonplace 
pictures. They cost me threepence each, in Swansea. 
Well, I am not concerned with their merit as pieces 
of decorative art. When I look at that wet road and 
rainy sky, I go back in thought to the days when I 
lived near Barnet, and the world was mine on Sun- 
day. I recall how I was wont to throw off my morn- 
ing lethargy, get astride my bicycle, a pipe in one 
pocket and a book in the other, and plunge into the 
open country beyond Hadley Heath. It had rained, 
very likely, in the morning, and the roads were clean 
and fresh, and the trees were sweet after their bath. 
And as the afternoon closed in I would sit on a gate 
in some unfrequented lane and watch the red fog 
darken over London town. I was happy then, as 
few lads are, I think. Those long silences, those 



I40 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

solitary communings, were mind-building all the 
time. So, when I came away from home and settled 
in Chelsea, and heard men talk, I felt that I, too, 
had something to say. 

In like manner my snowscape takes me back to 
the time when I was a mechanic, engine-building 
near Aylesbury. We lived half a mile from the works, 
at an old inn, and we began at six o'clock. In winter 
time, I remember, we would snuggle into the big 
back kitchen, with its huge cauldron of pig-meat 
swinging over the open fire, and its barrels containing 
evil things like stoats and ferrets, to put on our 
boots; and when we opened the door, two feet of 
snow would fall in upon the floor. How well I 
remember that silent trudge up the bleak Birming- 
ham Road to the works! There were always two 
broad ruts in the white roadway — the mail-coach 
had passed silently, at two o'clock. Cold, cold, 
cold! A white silence, save for our dark figures 
shuffling softly through the snow. And then a long 
eleven-hour day. 

XXV 

I HAVE occasionally mentioned my friend the Second. 
A keen, dark-skinned, clean-shaven face, with small 
blue eyes and regular white teeth. There are no 
flies on him. His is one of those minds which can 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 141 

grasp every detail of a profession and yet remain 
very ignorant indeed, a mind which travel has made 
broader — and shallower. He is a clever, courteous, 
skilful, well-bred, narrow-minded Broad-Churchman. 
He is a total abstainer, a non-smoker, and a fre- 
quenter of houses of fair reception. If anomaly can 
go further, I can declare to you that he is engaged 
to a clergyman's daughter. When he is angered, 
his face grows as thin as a razor, the small blue eyes 
diminish to ghttering points, and the small white 
teeth close like a vise. It is then that I am sorry 
for the clergyman's daughter. We do not under- 
stand each other, I fear, because I am so unsenti- 
mental. He believes in unpractical things like 
Money, Success, Empire, Home Life, Football, and 
Wales for ever. How can a man who puts faith in 
such visionary matters understand one who builds 
on the eternal and immovable bedrock of literature 
and art? He has sober dreams of following in his 
father's steps and making a fortune for himself, and 
he considers me weak in the head when I explain 
that I have made my wealth and am now enjoying 
it. Would he ever understand, I wonder? 

"Yes, there are some from whom our Lady flies. 
Whose dull, dead souls, rise not at her command. 
And who, in blindness, press hack from their eyes 
' The light that never was on sea or land', ' 



142 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

In fact, I should say he is one of those same 
mechanicians of whom I spoke, in whose Hves Htera- 
ture will have no place, and the desire for a private 
harem supplant the grande passion. This may 
sound absurd when one remembers their love of 
home; but I speak with knowledge. It is easy 
enough to make a man out to be a patriot, or a 
humanitarian, or a home-lover, if you pick and choose 
from his complicated mentahty just what suits that 
particular label. To know a man as he is, you must 
be shipmates with him, quarrel with him, mess 
with him week after week until you are sick of the 
sight of him. Then, if you are sufficiently sensitive 
to personality, you will divine his spiritual bedrock 
beneath all the superimposed recencies, and you will 
know whether he be "a mere phosphatous prop of 
flesh " or whether he have in him some genuine metal- 
lic rock, from which the fabric of the distant world- 
state may be fashioned. 

XXVI 

Once more I am writing ''homeward bound.'* 
Homeward bound! Outside the Channel fog is 
coming down to enfold us, the wind is cold, my stock 
of fruit, laid in at Las Palmas is done, and George 
the Fourth is growling through the ventilator, 
"T' Longships, mister!" 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 143 

I Longships — that's twelve hours' run from the 

I Mumble Head, the great white lenticular lenses of 
I which fling wide-sweeping spokes of light across 
the tumbling waters of the Channel. The Skipper 
is cautious, has been twenty-two hours on bridge 
and in chart-room; refuses to go ahead until he 
i can locate Lundy. We heard, in Grand Canary, 
that the big White Star Satanic is lying near the 
Lizard, back broken, total loss, heroic passengers 
all safely landed. Wonderful people, passengers. 
If they keep hysteria at a distance for a few hours, 
they are bravoed from one end of the Empire to the 
other. The Satanic^ s engineers,? The Empire has 
overlooked them, I suppose, which is their own pe- 
culiar glory. 

Homeward bound! "Finishing," too, for three 
of us. Chief, Second, and Fourth are leaving when 
we get in, and I shall be alone for a few days. That 
means work, I fear, and no joyful run up to Padding- 
ton this time. Well, well, next time / finish, and 
we shall foregather in the Walk once more. I was 
thinking, only a day or two back, that Chelsea Em- 
bankment must be in its glory now, glory of early 
spring. That noble line of granite coping and 
twinkling lights. How often have we walked down 
past the Barracks from Knightsbridge, taken pot- 
luck at the coffee-stall at the corner, and then 



144 ^N OCEAN TRAMP 

fared homeward between the river and the trees! 
Ah, me! To do it once again — that is what I long 
for. 

In the meanwhile, the Longships are away astern, 
the Skipper has found Lundy, a grey hump on the 
port bow in the morning light, and we are "full 
ahead" for the Mumbles. Sailors' bags are drying 
on the cylinder-tops, Chief, Second, and Fourth are 
fixing up a "blow-out" up town to-morrow night; 
mess-room steward is polishing the brasswork till 
it shines like gold; and I am writing to my very good 
friend. We are all very cheerful, too; no "sailors' 
gloom" in our faces as we go on watch. George 
the Fourth (I cannot imagine what the ship will be 
like without him) is making himself ridiculous by 
doing everything for "t' last time." "T' last time!" 
he mutters as he starts the evaporator and adjusts 
the vapour-cock. He is taking the temperatures for 
the last time. He is going up to South Shields for 
his "tickut," by which he means a first-class cer- 
tificate of competency issued by the Board of Trade. 
That is George the Fourth's utmost ambition. He 
is a man then; he is licensed to take any steamer of 
any tonnage into any sea on the chart. He has, 
moreover, a certain prestige, has this skylarky 
youth, when he gets his "chief's tickut." Ladies 
who preside over saloon bars will try to lure him into 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 145 

matrimony. He will grow (I hope) a little steadier, 
and' fall really and truly in love. 

My colleague the Second, he intends to work ashore 
and sleep at home. The clergyman's daughter, I 
imagine, will come more and more into the scheme 
of things, and the mother he loves so well will give 
him her blessing. So each, you see, has a clearly 
defined plan, while I drift along, planless, ambition- 
less, smoking many pipes. I have been trying to 
think out something practicable. Am I to drift 
always about the world, a mere piece of flotsam on 
Swansea tide? Or am I to sit down once more in 
Chelsea, hand and brain running to seed, while the 
world spins on outside? I must think out a plan. 
And I must school myself to cancel all plans begin- 
ning "If she will — if only." Why cannot I rise to 
some decent sense of self-respect, to say, as says the 
man in "The Last Ride Together": 

*' Take hack the hope you gave, — / claim 
Only a memory of the same." 

That's manly — pre-eminently Enghsh, in fact. 
But, meanwhile, I drift planless. 

The mighty Norseman, too, in his own sinewy 
Hyperborean style, is full of joy. His jolly pasty 
face beams joyously upon me. He will be "z passen- 
ger for one quid" from London to Gothenburg, 



146 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

thence to Stockholm, and Marianna. The engine- 
room is bulging, in places, with the contraband goods 
he is bringing home for Marianna. Pieces of silk 
"for the Signorina," as the handsome old huxter- 
lady at Canary purrs in our ears; bottles of Florida 
water, mule canaries, and Herrick's ov/n divine 
Canary Sack, to which he so often bade "farewell." 
All these for the dainty maiden who indulges in 
German Script. God speed you, oh, mighty Norse- 
man! May your frescoed bosom never prove un- 
faithful to your grey-eyed maiden. I, at least, have 
been the better for having known you — a ship pass- 
ing in the night. 

And so we come to the Mumble Head. 

XXVII 

Paid off, free for the afternoon, with overcoat 
buttoned up and collar about my ears, I stroll aim- 
lessly through the town. It has often been my am- 
bition to emulate those correct creatures who, when 
they come to a place, study maps, read guide-books, 
and "do" the sights one by one. But, so far, I am 
a dead failure. Even my own dear London is known 
to me by long-continued pedestrianism. When I 
reach a town I put up by chance, I see things by 
chance, leave on an impulse, and carry away precious 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 147 

glimpses of nothing in particular that I can piece 
togetlier at leisure into a sort of mnemonic mosaic. 
Well, so I stroll through Swansea, trying to forget 
the only two facts which I know concerning it — that 
Beau Nash was born here and Savage died here. 
They are like bits of grit in the oyster of my content. 
I will turn aside and see life. 

I enter one of my favourite taverns. I am sur- 
rounded by maidens, bar-maidens, and a fat land- 
lady. Amy, Baby, Starlight, Chubby — all are here, 
clamorous for the baubles I had promised them four 
months before. My friend would be shocked at 
their familiarity; I admit, from a certain point of 
view, it is scandalous. But, then, all things are still 
forgiven to sailors. And so, business being slack, 
I am dragged into the bar-parlour and commanded 
to disgorge. I produce bottles of perfume, little 
buckhorns, ostrich feathers, flamingo wings, and 
bits of silk. The big pocket of my overcoat is dis- 
charged of its cargo. I am suflPocated with salutes 
of the boisterous, tom-boy kind, and am commanded 
to name my poison. 

As a reward. Chubby promises to go with me to 
that iridescent music-hall up the street. Chubby's 
appearance is deceptive. She is diminutive, with 
a Kenwigs tail of plaited hair down her straight little 
back. But she is almost twenty; she is amazingly 



148 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

swift behind the bar, and no man has yet bilked her 
of a penny. There is a Spartan courage about the 
small maiden, too, which I cannot but admire. Her 
parents are dead; her sisters both died the same week 
a year ago; she must earn her living; but — "No use 
mopin', is it?" she inquires as she fingers a locket 
containing photographs which hangs around her neck. 
That is her philosophy, couched in language that re- 
sembles herself. I should be only too delighted to 
take her. But — there is my incorrigible habit of 
reading a book or lapsing into intellectual oblivion 
while at the play. How many comedies have I 
"seen" without hearing a single word! So, when 
I go to the iridescent music-hall, something in the 
programme, or the audience, will set me musing, 
and Chubby will be neglected. I think I shall buy 
two tickets, and let Chubby take someone else — 
George the Fourth, say! 

And Baby, fingering the silk I have brought her — 
Baby personifies for me that terrible problem which 
women and men treat so callously. Baby has al- 
ready passed several milestones on the road to Alsatia 
and we shall meet her some day, somewhere between 
Hyde Park Corner and Wardour Street. 

But that is far away yet. The glamour of the 
thing, its risk, its pleasantness, are over her as yet. 
Officers of the Mercantile Marine are not squeamish 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 149 

in a home port, nor are they scarce. Baby's rings 
are worth good money. The sordid bickerings of the 
trade are in the future, the callous calculations, the 
indispensable whiskey. 

Now, while Baby is bending the violet eyes of her 
upon a piece of Moorish silk, let me clear my mind 
of humbug. I am no sentimentalist in this matter. 
I am not certain, yet, that "my lady" of to-day is 
the sole repository of every virtue; neither am I dog- 
matic about "necessary vice," the "irreducible 
minimum," and such-like large viewpoints. I have, 
indeed, nursed a theory that our floating population 
might be induced to receive a certain percentage of 
these adjuncts to civilisation, one or two on each 
ship, say, with results satisfactory to all concerned. 
Everyone knows that, in towns, the demand is 
grotesquely disproportionate to the supply. The 
Board of Trade could deal with the question of 
certificates of competency. 

As I sit in this bar-parlour, it seems to me that an 
inextinguishable howl of horror is rising from the 
people of England. And as I desire to be honest, I 
admit that I am overawed by that same tumult — a 
sort of singing in my ears — and so leave the problem 
to Mr. H. G. Wells, or someone else who deals ha- 
bitually in social seismics. 

After all, descriptions of seaport barmaids can 



ISO AN OCEAN TRAMP 

scarcely be interesting to my friend. If she lose no 
time in providing him with hot rum and water 
(not ungenerous with the sugar), she can rival either 
Pompadour or La Pelletier — he cares not which. 
Which is the callous regard of the whole business 
to which I have referred. 

Once more adrift, I wend my way dockwards, 
pause at the Seamen's Mission, hesitate, and am 
lost. I enter a workhouse-like room, and a colour- 
less man nods good-afternoon. Conveniences for 
"writing home," newspapers, magazines, flamboyant 
almanacks of the Christian Herald type. Pears' Soap 
art, and " Vessels entered inwards.'' For the asking 
I may have back numbers of the Christian Herald. 
Mrs. Henry Wood's story-books are obtainable 
by the cubic foot. As the colourless man opens his 
mouth to address me, I shudder and back out. 
Give me vice, give me boredom, give me anything 
in the world but this "practical religion" and smug 
futility of ignoble minds. 

I fear my philosophy has broken away and I am 
misanthropic. Possibly because I shall not see my 
friend this home-coming. Moreover, I am due on 
the ship even now, for the others are going off to their 
triumphal "finish" up town. Faring back, then, I 
come to the dock-head at sunset, and it is my hour. 
Darkness is rushing down upon the shipping as I 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 151 

watch. In the distance hill piled on hill, blue dome 
upon blue dome, spangled with myriad firefly lights, 
backed by the smoky red of winter sunset; and here 
the shipping, ghostly now in the darkness, exquisitely 
beautiful in the silence. From out at sea comes a 
faint '' ah-00-00-00'' — one more toiler coming in to 
rest. And it is night. 

XXVIII 

My friend the Chief Officer is putting fresh clothes 
on his bed. Clean sheets and blankets and a snowy 
counterpane ("All sorts o' people come in to have a 
chat, Mr. McAlnwick") are arranged with due care. 
He is brisk to-night, is my good friend, having no 
log to modify this time, and nothing else on hand for 
a day or two. Photos dusted, ports opened, tobacco 
and whiskey duly placed between us, he climbs into 
his nest and proceeds to converse. A sort of 
" Tabagie" or tobacco parliament, such as was once 
in force at Potsdam. 

"Sure," he snorts, "'twas blackmail the baggage 
was after, ye can take it from me, and — keep the 
door open when she's sorting the things." 

Being a young man, I wait, seated sedately on the 
settee, to hear more concerning "the baggage," 
who is, let me explain, an itinerant blanchisseuse des 



152 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

equipages of equivocal repute. The Mate reaches 
for his pipe. 

"Would ye believe it, Mr. McAlnwick ? She comes 
in here, while I'm lying in me bunk, closes the door, 
and comes up to me. Says she, 'Oh, Mr. Mate, I'm 
very unhappy!' and puts her arms round me neck, 
in spite — in spite of all I could do, and falls to 
screamin'!" 

"'Slack back,' says I, 'or ye'll be the most un- 
happy woman in this town.' An' then Nicholas 
he puts his head in." 

"The Steward!" I ejaculate. 

"The same. Ye see, mister, the baggage, she 
thought the Old Man was aboard, and — she 
was goin' to make out a case! Says Nicholas, 
'Oh, my words! I'll fetch police!' An' away he 
cuts. 

"How embarrassing!" 

The blue eyes of my friend the Mate are twinkling, 
his face is screwed up, and his nose is wrinkled all the 
way up. He is more like my old Headmaster than 
ever. 

" 'Twas so, Mr. McAlnwick — 'twas so. Ye see, 
my besettin' sin is sympathy. I feel sorry for the 
baggage. She has a har-rd time of it, and the ends 
don't meet — won't meet, nohow. But, as I said, 
'Consider the situation, Mrs. Ambree.' *0h, Mr. 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 153 

Mate,' says she, 'will he fetch the police ? ' ' Possibly,' 
says I, 'if he finds one on the quay.' And she began 
cryin' fit to break me heart." 

To my surprise, the nose is still wrinkled; he 
breathes through his nose in a way that means "Ye 
don't know what's comin'." 

*"0h, I hope he won't be so cruel, Mr. Mate,' says 
she, cryin' as I said. 'For why?' says I, speakin' 
stern. 'You are an immoral wumman, Mrs. Am- 
bree.' 'Yes,' says she, 'I know that, Mr. Mate, I 
know that; but it would be har-rd on me if he was to 
fetch Jim aboard for me.' 'Jim?' says I. 'Who 
in thunder's Jim, Mrs. Ambree?' ' 'Tis my hus- 
band,' she sobs. 'He's on night duty in this dock, 
an' I'm a ruined soul if he finds out.' And she set 
down there, Mr. McAlnwick, just where you're settin' 
and burst into floods o' tears." 

"Dear me!" I observe. And the nose is one mass 
of humoursome corrugations. 

"Aye, 'tis so," continues the Chief Officer, pour- 
ing out "Black and White" for two. "An' at 
that moment in comes Nicholas, his face serious- 
like, and says he, 'Mrs. Ambree, ye're wanted.' 
An' she goes out wi' him, like Mary Queen o' Scots 
to the block!" 

"Mr. Honna, I'm surprised!" 

"Not a bit of it, McAlnwick, not a bit of it! At 



154 ^N OCEAN TRAMP 

first I thought Nicholas had been a fool and fetched 
a policeman, but Nicholas is no fool, as yeVe no 
doubt observed. Still, I got out an' put on me pants 
and went into the cabin. Passin' the Steward's 
door I heard voices. Enterin' the Steward's 
room, I saw him an' the baggage splittin' a Guin- 
ness and carryin' on! 'Twas scandalous, Mr. 
McAlnwick. To be done by a wire-haired, leather- 
skinned old reprobate like Nicholas. 'Twas a 
clear case, for his wife does all his washin' up at 
Bridgend." 

"I am shocked, Mr. Honna." 

*'Ye may well be. I was too. Pass the water- 
bottle, Mr. McAlnwick." 

"I hear," I observe, "I hear Alexander the 
Great is to have the Petruchio next time she comes 
in." 

"That's the rumour, Mr. McAlnwick. / think 
there's something in it, for me wife tells me that Mrs. 
Alexander was lookin' at a house in Cathay only last 
week. 'A house,' says she, *that will be not less 
than thirty pounds a year.' That means Petruchioy 
a. big ship." 

The above personage, you see, is the Chief, the 
man who wore elevators in his boots. 

"But why should he move into a larger house, Mr. 
Honna?" 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 155 

"To keep up his position in the world, Mr. Mc- 
Alnwick. 'Tis a big responsibihty, ye see. His 
youngster will now go to a — a scholastic academy 
while mine remain on the rates." 

"How are they, Mr. Honna?" 

"Fine, Mr. McAlnwick, fine! Jacko passed I 
don't know how many exams., and he's teaching the 
curate to play the organ. Hallo!" 

There is a knock at the door, and I rise to lift the 
hook which holds it. A stout man with a short 
moustache and a double chin — Tenniel's Bismarck to 
the life — touches his cap. It is the night watch- 
man. 

"Beg pardon, sir, Mr. Honna, but I don't feel well, 
sir, and I wanted to know, sir, if you'd mind my 
goin' to get a drop o' brandy, sir?" 

"Away ye go, then." 

"Thank you, sir. Shan't be long, sir. Only " 

"Have ye any money?" 

"Oh, yes, sir. Thank you all the same, sir." 

I close the door, Bismarck hastens away for brandy, 
and the Mate's nose is covered with wrinkles. 
Whereby I am at liberty to conclude that there is 
bunkum in the air. I cough. 

"See that man?" he says. I nod. 

"Skipper of a three-masted bark once." 

"Yes?" 



156 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

"He was!" 

"What brought him down to night watchman at 
thirty shillings a week?" 

"Bad health. He was always feehn' unwell, 
and he was tradin' between Liverpool and Bor- 
deaux." 

The Mate nods at me to emphasise his words, while 
I look at him gravely. 

"An' now," adds my friend the Mate, "I must turn 
out and see he comes back." 

"I'll do that — don't bother. So he's one of the 
derelicts?" 

"His brother was another. Died mad, over at 
Landore. Ever hear of Mad Robin? Well, he was 
Chief of a boat carryin' cotton to Liverpool. Comin' 
home from Savannah, dropped her propeller in mid- 
ocean." 

"Shipped his spare one?" Mr. Honna laughs 
shortly. 

"Didn't carry spares in that company, Mr. 
McAlnwick. No, he made one." 

"Made one! How?" 

"Out of a block of hornbeam and the plates of 
one of his bulkheads. Knocked about for a month 
waitin' for fine weather, tipped the ship, fixed his 
tin-pot screw on, and started 'slow ahead.' Came 
in under her own steam. Second Engineer in com- 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 157 

mand, Chief under restraint in his berth. Died 
over at Landore — D.T." 

With which abrupt epitaph the Mate reaches for 
his pants, while I, knocking out my pipe, go away to 
turn in. 

XXIX 

But I cannot sleep. Something hes at the back of 
my brain — a dull anxiety, hardly definable to myself. 
It is possible that I may see her again, when I come 
home once more. I shall know for certain in the 
morning. And yet it may so happen that it is in- 
deed finished. Nay, nay, my friend, have patience. 
I can see you as you read this, storming about the 
room, dropping red cigarette ash on the carpet, 
visibly perturbed in your mind at my madness. 

Yes, yes, I know I forswore it all in a moment of 
bitter cynicism. But, mon ami, I am a man — a very 
irregularly balanced man, too, I often think — and 
there rises from my soul an exceeding bitter cry 
sometimes. You see here my life — barmaid society, 
ship's tittle-tattle, unending rough toil. To have 
but one hold, one haven, one star to guide — canst 
blame me, mon ami, if I hold desperately to a tiny 
hope ? 

Thinking this out, I walk far out to the pier-head, 
beneath the harbour light, and look earnestly into 



158 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

the darkness covering the sea. Have pity, at least, 
old friend, when I write in pain. 

^^ Worth how well, those dark grey eyes. 
That hair so dark and dear, how worth. 

That a man should strive and agonise, 
And taste a very hell on earth 

For the hope of such a prize!" 

To which your much-tried patience replies merely, 
"Humph!" I suppose? But, old friend, is it not 
true? Have I not heard your own voice give way a 
little, your own hand falter with the eternal cigarette 
as some long-hidden memory swept across your 
mind? So I believe, and so I understand the terse 
silence when you rise abruptly from the piano in the 
middle of some sad, low improvisation, and I lose 
you in the smoke-laden darkness of the room. Life 
for us moderns has its difficulties at times, life 
being, as it were, anything but modern. We have 
so many gods, not all of them false, either; but the 
Voice of the Dweller in the Innermost brings their 
temples crashing about our ears, and we are home- 
less, godless, atheists indeed. 

I do not think this problem has been solved for us 
yet. It is all very well for the orthodox to say sneer- 
ingly, "Why not believe, like us? Why stand out- 
side the pearly gates, while Love and Lovers pace 
beneath the trees that grow by the River of Life? 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 159 

So easy, mes amis! Only believe. Do not delay, but 
come. Why not to-night?" We are further from 
yon purple-crowned heights than you wot of, good 
friends. Between us and that golden radiance lie 
many miles of dusty road, lies even the Valley of the 
Shadow, through which we have passed. And now, 
as we are emerging from that same Valley, out upon 
the broad high tablelands of Understanding, we 
turn and see the distant loveliness, and we halt and 
stumble, and (sometimes) lose our way. 

"She should never have looked on me. 

If she meant I should not love her ! 
There are plenty — men, you call such, 

I suppose — she may discover 
All her soul to, if she pleases. 

And yet leave much as she found them: 
But I'm not so, and she knew it 

When she fixed me, glancing round them." 

XXX 

Chains rattling, winches groaning, sun shining, long- 
shoremen shouting, breezes blowing. 

"God's in His heaven — 
All's right with the world" 

And the dock postman (dear old Postie, who 
cadges sticks of hard tobacco and cigars from u§ 



i6o AN OCEAN TRAMP 

when he brings good news) is standing on the quay 
while the ship is being moved into her new berth, 
and he waves a batch of letters when he sees me look- 
ing towards him. So! I have been burrowing in 
our boilers, testing the scale, inspecting stays and 
furnace crowns, and the joy of working has come back 
to me. I was solemn last evening, melancholic and 
somewhat metaphysical it seems; but let it stand. 
'Tis morning, and Postie's on the quay. 

I breakfast alone. The others are ashore, but 
they will appear during the day to finish up and 
to bestow mementoes on the wretched one they 
leave behind. And so I sit smoking my pipe by the 
mess-room fire; Postie descends, beaming expect- 
antly. He hands me two letters, one from my 
friend, one from 

There was a thick mist before my eyes, the fire 
seemed an infinitely distant red blur, and Postie, 
several continents away, was burbling about possible 
promotions, good voyage, fine weather, tobacco, and 
the like. Forgive me, old man, but your letter lay 
unopened for a while. I poured tobacco and cigars 
into Postie's pockets, and sat down to think things 
out. Was it foolish of me to sit down to think.? 
To set down the problem thus: Here am I, a man of 
infinite, almost unknowable latent possibilities, sud- 
denly repossessed of the supreme power and glory 



AN OCEAN TRAMP i6i 

of life. How can I, by taking thought, bring out 
those same possibilities, make them actual and 
patent to the world, apply them to the highest and 
noblest uses, and so justify myself before men? In 
some such manner did I put to my own soul the posi- 
tion, trying ever to keep in view the sanctity, the 
holiness of life, and the preciousness of its holiest of 
holies, where dwell, as I have said, the power and the' 
glory. 

It is late in the evening of this most momentous 
day, and I must put down my pen, but there is one 
thought which perhaps may serve as answer to the 
scepticism so often expressed when I asserted my 
belief in this world after all. I mean if a man, when 
he experiences some transcendent joy, is prompted 
to express that joy in terms of nobler effort and 
jterner consecration to the welfare of others — does 
not this fact lead him to infer that happiness is, at 
least, more natural than unhappiness.'' that the 
universe does indeed exist, in Emerson's phrase, 
"hospitably for the weal of souls"? That, in fine, 
when the majority turn their faces this way, first 
keeping the houses of their souls swept and gar- 
nished for the love they are awaiting, then will the 
mountain of our misery be levelled, our valleys of 
despair filled up, and the rough places of life made 
plain ? 



1 62 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

So, at least, it seems to me just now as I sit and 
write. How I long for a talk with my friend ! 

"You re my friend ! 
What a thing friendship is, tvorld without end!" 

XXXI 

I WAS awakened by something rattling outside my 
open window-port, wakened to a small tragedy. A 
circular wire rat-trap, depending from a line held 
by someone on the poop, and containing two frantic 
rats, dangled against the opening Alas how they 
ran round and round and round! The cause of all 
their agony, a piece of decayed fish and a fragment 
of mouldy cheese, was left untouched as they dangled 
before me. The voice of my friend the Mate is audi- 
ble down my ventilator. He is arguing with the 
Steward, one Nicholas, of whom you have heard. 
Said Nicholas is protesting in his clickety Graeco- 
English fashion, that the pelt of a drowned rat 
{dronded raht, Nicholas loquitur) is worth less than 
that of one skinned alive. To which horrible doc- 
trine my friend the Mate opposes a blustering Irish 
humaneness issuing in "Dammit, ye shan't!" Rat, 
meanwhile dangling, they as well as their fate hang- 
ing uncertain. At last they are lowered. (The 
Mate talking, I think, over his shoulder at Nicholas, 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 163 

who stands, probably in contemplative fashion, legs 
apart, face serious, brain calculating income deriva- 
ble from rats skinned alive.) The line rising in a 
minute, I turn on my elbow to witness the end. 
Alas! HelasH Ach HimmelH! How are the mighty 
fallen! Two grey shining lumps, each with tapering 
tail dropped Hmply through the bottom; fish, cheese, 
and rodents all on one dead level now, given over to 
corruption. Up, up — I hear the trap grounded on 
the poop over my head. I sigh as I climb out and 
wash. I rather like rats. The Grey One in the 
tunnel is an old chum of mine. I have never killed 
one yet, though often even Grey One has been 
chased up and down, in fun. He, sitting on a 
stringer and twirling his whiskers, has "views," I 
think, about Men with Sticks, his conception of the 
Devil and all his angels. 

John Thomas, bursting in with hot water for shav- 
ing and information concerning breakfast in the cabin, 
interrupts my rat-reverie. It is Sunday morning. 

"Eight o'clock, sir. Steward say, sir, will you have 
breakfast with the Chief Officer?" 

"No one else aboard?" 

"Second Officer's in the galley, sir." 

"Where?" 

"Galley, sir." A snigger from John Thomas. 
"Come aboard early, sir." 



1 64 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

"Oh! Tell the Steward *Yes, with pleasure.'" 
So! I finish dressing leisurely, donning patrol- 
jacket and uniform cap, and "turn out." It is a 
calm Sabbath morning. Not yet have the mists 
rolled from the heights which frown upon us all 
around, but the sun glitters on the docked shipping, 
silent save for the flapping of sea gulls and the clank 
of some fresh-water pump. With a glance of hom- 
age towards the sun, I go below for my inspection. 
Boilers, fires banked in the donkey-boilers over week- 
end, bilges, sea-cocks all in order; I am at liberty to 
enjoy my day of rest. Nicholas, in white drill coat, 
shining silver buttons, and shore-boots of burnished 
bronze hue, glides aft with a dish (held high, in the 
professional manner) covered with a dome of gleam- 
ing pewter. Two youths on the quay, fishing hope- 
lessly for insignificant dock carp, watch with open- 
mouthed awe. My own buttons of yellow metal, 
linen collar, and badge de rigueur, pass a similar scru- 
tiny as I follow him to the saloon. 

The saloon, compared with our own quarters, is 
sumptuously furnished. Panelled in hard woods, 
white ceiling with shining nickel rods and brackets, 
carpeted floor and ruby-plush upholstering — into 
such a palace I step to take breakfast with my friend 
the Mate. He is already entrenched behind the 
pewter dome, Nicholas gliding round giving the final 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 165 

touch of art to the preparations. The subject of 
skinned rats has vanished to make room for the 
serious business of his Hfe. 

**Good-mornin', Mr. McAlnwick. Sit there! We 
are alone to-day, as ye see. Nicholas!" 

Nicholas is a believer in ritual. He is tolling his 
little brass hand-bell just as though everyone was 
here. In a minute he reappears. 

"Sir?" 

"Is Mr. Hammerton aboard?" A snigger from 
John Thomas, installed pro tern, in the pantry as the 
Steward's aide-de-camp. 

*' 'S in de galley, mister." 

"Does he want any breakfast?" 

"No, sir. 'S 'sleep in de galley." Another 
snigger. 

"What's the matter with that boy?" thunders 
my friend the Mate, lifting the dome from ham and 
eggs. 

"He is merely cursed with a sense of humour, Mr. 
Honna," I observe, and we avoid conversational rock 
and shoals until we are ensconced in his private berth. 

"The fact is, Mr. McAlnwick, Mr. Hammerton's 
a very foolish young feller. Help yourself to some 
tobacco. Knowin' as I do that when he went ashore 
last night he had twenty-six pounds ten in his cash 
pocket, I wonder he isn't lyin' at the bottom o' the 



1 66 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

dock instead of in the galley. He will not bank his 
surplus. And he zvill get drunk." 

"What's at the bottom of it all, Mr. Honna?" 

"I'll show ye!" With a hoarse whisper he rises, 
tip-toes swiftly along the corridor to the Second 
Officer's room, and returns with a photograph. 

Baby! Is she another milestone nearer to Alsatia, 
then? My pipe remains unlit as I gaze at the cheap 
provincial photograph of a girl with large eyes and 
a sensuous mouth. 

Mr. Honna pushes his cap back and stares at me. 

"What! D'ye know her?" 

"It's Baby," I answer, laying the thing down. 
"Baby!" 

"He's engaged to her." 

"Since when?" 

"Since — Gawd knows — last Monday, I beheve." 

I reach for the matches, and recount to the Mate 
my knowledge of Baby. His nose wrinkles up, his 
eyes diminish to steel-blue points of fire, and he nods 
his head slowly to my tale. 

"Same old yarn. Oh, Mr. McAlnwick, are there 
not queer things come in with the tide ? Now listen, 
while I tell ye. 'Tis what they all do. They 
dangle round bars, all at loose ends, they get their 
master's tickets, and they marry barmaids. Then 
when the command comes along, the woman keeps 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 167 

the man down in the mud. 'Twas with me, too. I 
was engaged to a Nova Scotia girl — two Nova 
Scotia girls — different times. I'd roll round town, 
givin' 'em to understand I was master, take 'em out 
drivin' in a buggy Sunday evenin', makin' a fool o' 
meself fine. When the crash came — oh, Mr. Mc- 
Alnwick, make use of your advantages now yer're 
at sea! — when the crash came, we were just ready 
to sail, an' I stayed by the ship. But next time 
'twould be the same. I couldn't be acquainted with 
a girl for a week without proposin' matrimony! 
Mr. McAlnwick, ye mustn't laugh. 'Tis the truth. 
Even now — but why talk? Ye know my sym- 
pathetic nature. But this seems to be serious. So 
she's the barmaid at the Stormy Petrel, is she? 
Humph!" 

"His brains must be addled," I observe, "not to 
see 

"Ah! but ye're young, Mr. McAlnwick! That's 
no hindrance in the worrld to — to such as him. OA, 
dear no!" 

"Then such as he have a very low standard of 
morality." 

"Mr. McAlnwick, now listen. When ye've been 

sent to sea at twelve year old as apprentice, an' 

ploughed the oceans of the worrld for five years in 

' the foc'sle, when ye've been bullied an' damned by 



1 68 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

fifty different skippers on fifty different trades as 
third and second mate, when ye've spHt yer head 
studyin' for yer ticket, when ye've got it and ye're 
glad to go second mate at seven pounds ten a month, 
when ye see men o' less merit promoted because they 
marry skippers' daughters while you are walkin* 
the bridge — what 'ud ye do?" 

*'I don't know, mister." I am taken aback by the 
velocity of the question, by the Mate's earnestness. 

"Ye'd turn callous or religious, or go mad! Ye 
see, Mr. McAlnwick, there's a lot ye miss, though ye 
won't admit it. Ye come to sea and ye meet the 
cloth, but ye don't realise their trainin'. Ye laugh at 
us for our queer ways, such as never walkin' on the 
poop over the Skipper's head, never askin' for an- 
other helpin', never arguin' the point, an' such like. 
But consider that man's trainin'! Ye cannot .f* 
Ye've been brought up ashore, ye've had oppor- 
tunities for studyin' and conversin' with edyecated 
people, an' ye're frettin' for some young lady, as I 
can see — don't deny it, I saw Postie bring the letter — 
and ye wouldn't touch the likes o' this with a pair o' 
tongs. But with Mr. Hammerton 'tis different, do 
ye not see?" 

*'Yes, I see, a little. But you yourself, now " 

**Me? Oh, 'twas a special providence preserved 
me, Mr. McAlnwick, I was waitin' for a command 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 169 

at the time, and I was unable to get out o' the bar- 
gain. But ye know my wife." 

Now, there is no doubt in my mind, after some 
thought, that the Chief Officer was right in insisting 
on the unspanned gulf between the old style officer 
and the men of our sphere. Heavenly powers! 
What have I not seen, now that the Mate has re- 
minded me? The fatuous ignorance, the bigoted 
conceit, the nauseous truckling to *'the Old Man," 
the debased intellect. And yet the Second Officer 
does not always lie in drunken stupor on the galley 
bench. I call to mind a time when he took a violin 
and played to me as the sun went down across the 
foam-flecked sea. Let us remember him by that 
rather than by his present state, and leave the rest to 
God. 

XXXII 

It is, I think, an inestimable privilege to claim the 
friendship of a man whose life and letters are a 
perpetual stimulus to action, an invariable provoca- 
tive of thought. I have just had a letter from my 
friend, telling me that he is in despair of the stage. 
His play is a thing of the past, and he vows that he 
has done with dramatic art for ever. 

Now being, like Goldsmith, a person who spends 
1 much time in taverns and coffee-houses, where one 



170 .AN OCEAN TRAMP 

can study every conceivable shade of character, I 
took my friends' letter up town with me, and sat 
down to muse over it and a tankard of ale. It was a 
cosy bar, cosier than the Cheshire Cheese, if more 
modern; I sank back in a deep lounge and watched 
the world go round. 

To commence, I thought to myself, these people 
here constitute a potential public for a play. There- 
fore, supposing it were my play, my attitude towards 
them is a factor in the dramatic problem. What is 
my definition, my analysis of this potential public ? 

Well, they are all engaged in a terrific struggle for 
safety. They have no social instinct apart from the 
instinct to combine for safety. Their ideal is a 
tradesman, a pedlar, who has accumulated sufficient 
wealth to be safe from poverty. Their ideal of 
religion is one which guarantees safety from hell. 
They do not believe, and they tell you bluntly they 
do not believe, any man who claims to be an altruist. 
They do not believe any man who protests that he 
does not worship wealth — i.e., safety. 

By this time I was puzzled to know how to answer 
my friend's complaints. All I knew was that, to 
strike one blow on the metal and drop the hammer 
because it jarred his fingers, argues sloth, not the 
** artistic temperament." Oh, mon ami, that ''artis- 
tic temperament." "Is this all? Up again!" If 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 171 

you are discouraged I can only suggest a course of 
reading in the lives of dramatists. I recall a few off- 
hand — Lessing, Moliere, Scribe, Wagner, Ibsen, 
these will suffice. When did they stop and fold 
their hands in despair.? As for the Elizabethan and 
Restoration playwrights, their facility of invention, 
their exuberance under difficulties is devastating. 
That, however, is not your problem. Your drama 
of to-day is an old bottle with no wine in it. You 
fail because words have ceased to have any definite 
meaning. The words in a man's mouth bear as little 
relation to his emotions as the architecture of his 
house bears to his ideas. Words like Love, God, 
Faith, and Soul are mere coloured balloons floating 
about the modern West End stage. It is easy to be 
horrified at such a view, but men like me, who deal 
with thingSy are not to be humbugged. You put a 
man in a commonplace predicament, and you make 
him say tragically, "The die is cast," or "I will see 
him hanged first," or "All is over between us." 
That is not drama; it is nonsense. Dies are rarely 
h cast nowadays, public hangings have been abolished, 
i and salaries rule too low to risk breach of promise 
actions. There's your dilemma. Write me a play 
in which every word is meant — the drama will look 
jj- after itself. But, if you will allow a young man to 
suggest a point, I say that you are all working in the 



172 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

dark; you are groping blindly forward when you 
might rejoice in the sunlight. And now, with my 
colleagues as texts, I shall read a homily on the 
conditions of modern dramatic art. 

The division of biped mammalia into merely men 
and women is of comparatively recent date. In 
very early times, however, when wisdom was com- 
moner than now, the classification began with gods 
and goddesses, heroes, men and women, with lower 
types like fauns and satyrs. I venture to think that 
this nomenclature might with advantage be revived. 
From time to time, in the history of the human mind 
since Anno Domini, one sees efforts to differentiate, 
generally with scant success. The Roman Catholic 
Church, with her elaborate canonising machinery, 
stands as the most prosperous example of this, though 
with the vital fault of postponing the sanctifying till 
after death. She, again, is responsible for another 
attempt, viz., the infallibility of her ministers, a 
promising enough plan, but ill regulated. The 
Stuart regime, urging with unpleasant vigour the 
divinity of kingship and the corresponding caddish- 
ness (or decadence) of much of the rest of mankind, 
is a signal example of how my plan should not be 
carried out. Carlyle's heroes are mostly supermen; 
individuals, not types. 

Now, I suggest to you that we agree to classify my 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 173 

colleagues, the masters of the mighty vapour, the 
beings who are the real cloud-compellers of our day, 
as heroes. If I mistake not, I have a prior claim to 
the word, too, in that Hero's engine is the type of all 
our modern prime movers, the supreme type to which 
we are ever striving to approximate. Masters of the 
vapour-driven sphere! Not men, but heroes, having 
their own thoughts, their own joys and sorrows, 
their own gods; more than men, in that they need 
less than men, less than gods, in that they owe 
allegiance to them. 

Well, then, here is your dramatic problem. Until 
you recognise the fact that such beings as I have 
indicated do actually inhabit the earth and cover the 
sea with their handiwork, until you consider the 
tremendous fact that your world's work is done by 
heroes, and not by politicians and commercial 
travellers, that, in short, your intellectual Franken- 
steins have made a million-brained monster whom 
you cannot, dare not destroy, your drama will not be 
a living force. I hold out no hope that the problem 
is easy of solution; I only know it exists. You will 
first of all become as little children, and learn, as 
best you may, what makes the wheels go round. 
Learn, that you may teach, by your creative art. 
Above all, remember, when you rise to protest that I 
am forgetting Nature, that together with "the way 



174 ^AT OCEAN TRAMP 

of an eagle in the air, and the way of a serpent upon 
a rock," the Hebrew poet has joined "the way of a 
ship in the midst of the sea, and the way of a man 
with a maid." 

XXXIII 

I HAVE been up town "to meeting," as my father used 
to say. The air was clear and warm when my friend 
the Mate appeared on deck in all the splendour of 
"shore gear." He affects a material which never 
wears out. "Mr. McAlnwick, these here are the 
pants I was married in!" He reserves his serious 
thoughts for underwear, of which he carries a por- 
tentous quantity to last a voyage. Smart young 
cadets, who never wear the same collar twice, and 
sport white shirts and soiled souls in seamen's mis- 
sions, are the Mate's aversion. He has severe 
censures for "gallivantin"' and "dressin' for show." 
He approves of my own staid habits of life, after the 
fashion of those elderly folk who admire in others 
what they so sadly lacked in their own spring-time. 
He forgets that perhaps even I have trembled with 
rage because there was a spot on my collar, that even 
I may have spent precious moments folding and 
pressing a favourite pair of trousers. 

The Mate does not often go ashore nowadays, 
even to missions, and so the lavendery smell which 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 175 

exhales from the historic pants scarcely has time to 
dissipate before they are back in the chest. Differ- 
ent now, from his young days, when the vessel lay 
alongside the Quai de la Bourse in Rouen City, and 
my friend stepped across each evening to the Cafe 
Victor to drink creme de menthe and feel that listening 
to the band was rather wicked and altogether Con- 
tinental. Indeed, his attachment to the ship is now 
proverbial, the prevailing feeling having been bril- 
liantly epitomised by himself. "If I wash me face," 
he snapped to me one day; "If I wash me face, they 
think I'm goin' ashore!" But now the decent 
double-breasted blue serge, the trim beard and 
black bowler hat are in evidence; my friend the 
Mate is about to attend divine service at the 
Seamen's Mission. My own appearance in mufti 
causes excitement. 

"Ye're comin', Mr. McAlnwick?" 

"As far as the door," I reply. 

The Chief Officer's blue eyes glint as he wrinkles 
his nose. 

" 'Tis my opinion, Mr. McAlnwick, that ye've a 
young woman in the town yerself." 

And we go forth into the town. At the door of the 
Mission I bid the Mate farewell, and I catch a last 
glimpse of him as he removes his hat and wipes his 
boots with the diffidence apparently interwoven in 



176 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

the fibre of all mariners ashore. He is not of 
a proselytising disposition. Strong Orangeman, an 
Ulster Protestant, and — the rest. So, thinking of 
him, I fare onward, watching the show. Men and 
maidens idly saunter along, or hasten to the house of 
God. Why, I wonder, do girls of religious disposition 
allow themselves so little time to dress? Two or 
three have passed me; one had a button loose at the 
back of her dress; another's "stole" of equivocal 
lace was unsymmetrically adjusted to her shoulders; 
and so on. I know that God looketh not on the 
outward semblance, but I am also painfully aware 
that young men are not fashioned after their Creator 
in that respect, and my desire to see everybody 
married is outraged by these omissions. And looking 
into the faces of my fellow-passengers this Sunday 
evening, I am led to think that, as a class, girls are 
not very beautiful objects when they lack refinement. 
I see much raw material around me which might 

possibly be hewn into lovely shape — but To my 

friend, with his intellectual Toryism, this hiatus is 
quite reasonable. These lower classes, he will ob- 
serve sublimely, have their functions; refinement is 
not for all. And the St. James's Gazette rustles com- 
fortably as he sinks back into the saddle-bags again! 
Well, let me be honest in this matter. My mind 
is still in a fluid state concerning theories of society. 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 177 

I can only generalise. I believe, with Emerson, that 
the world exists ultimately for the weal of souls; I 
believe, also, the spiritually correlative truth, the 
ultimate probity of those same souls, but — I have 
not yet discovered why I abhor contact with those 
who hold the same political faith. Am I mis- 
anthropic? Or unsocial? Why, when I sit reso- 
lutely down to hear my own beliefs preached, do I 
silently contest each point, adopt the contrary view? 
Why do I avoid "active propaganda," "working for 
the cause," and such like? Is it because I disbelieve 
utterly in preaching? I do that, anyway. I often 
think how much farther ahead we should be if no one 
ever preached. I do not condemn lecturing by any 
means. I dislike the packed audience of the conven- 
tional preacher, socialistic or otherwise. My ideal 
is the heterogeneous assembly, hearkening to the 
words of a man skilled in oratory, profound in 
thought, a genius in the art of the suggestive phrase. 
The audience in all probability would be far from 
clear as to his intentions; they would grow clearer 
as time went on and the suggestions ripened into 
independent speculation. If they could under- 
stand at once what he intends, they would stand in 
no need of his ministry. 

You will perceive how unfitted I was for the meet- 
ing I attended to-night. The uppermost thought in 



178 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

mind as I left was, "I do not believe in bloodless 
revolutions." You cannot have a revolution of 
society without turning part of it upside down. And 
I am half afraid that a good deal of what I value 
most in this world will be turned upside down by a 
socialistic revolution. Add the sad, indisputable 
fact that if everyone were a Socialist I should, by 
natural law, be a Tory, and you will see, more or 
less accurately, how I stand. You will see, too, the 
cause of my belief in heroes and gods, which latter 
you call natural laws. I look upon myself as a 
man working among gods and heroes, and I am 
beginning to think that the question of revolutions 
rests always ultimately with them, while I, a man, 
can but look on and marvel. 

Well, I am tired with my jaunt. One's feet are 
not inured to walking after months at sea. And I 
hear my friend the Mate overhead. 

"Mr. McAlnwick, ye should have been there! The 
elite o' the Mission was on show. An' we had an 
anthem. 'Twas good ! " 

I slip ashore with my letter before turning in. 

XXXIV 

Though I had no intention of buying many books, 
the dreary loneliness of the tavern where I supped 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 179 

drove me out upon the streets, and insensibly I 
drifted towards my favourite second-hand book- 
shop, where the little maiden behind the mountains 
of Welsh theology reminds me of someone I know. 
My Welsh Divinity I call her, hovering bright- 
winged above the dust-clouds of old literature, with 
clear grey eyes and nervous mouth. Not "the heir 
of all the ages," I fear, though the potentiality in her 
must be infinite and beyond my ken. "What do 
you, oh, young man?" So I seem to read the query 
in her eyes. "Are you only a hodman in this book- 
yard, then ? Where is she ? What is she ? Who is 
she ? " As I stand and thumb the serried ranks of 
corpses, I feel her gaze upon me. Quite inarticulate, 
both of us, you understand — I as shy as she. 

I must seem extraordinarily sensitive to you, I 
think. Merely the presence of this child stirs my soul 
to nobler ideals. I feel invigorated and refreshed. So 
my lady stirs me; so even the mere presence of some 
men we know. In like manner, I imagine, is my 
friend influenced by superb music. They affect me 
like an essay by Pater, a Watts portrait, or a Dulwich 
Cuyp, a feeling which I can only call a passionate in- 
tellectualism, a loosening of corporeal encumbrances. 
My friend will not carp because I seem to place my 
love for my mistress in a category with a Dutch 
landscape and an aesthetic essay — he will understand. 



i8o ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

I have no desire to be proud, but I confess I have 
never appreciated that amorousness which prompts 
the lovers to exchange hats as well as vows. Indeed, 
I scarcely understand what the older poets mean by 
vows even. What are these vows? By whom are 
they kept .^ Of what avail are they when they are 
most needed? Nearly as useless as marriage vows, 
these of the trysting-place, I fancy. You hold up 
your hands in horror at this, not because you dis- 
agree, but because of my audacity in applying 
general modernisms to myself. Well, I am tired of 
people who pose as advanced thinkers and remain as 
conventional as ever. We have outgrown so much 
of the sentimentalism of Love that muddle-headed 
moderns imagine that we have outgrown Love itself. 
The keynote of everything worthy in modern life and 
art and philosophy is — restraint. I decline to regard 
ranting as eloquence because the Elizabethan ranted 
well, and I decline also to accept the Shakesperian 
conception of Love, viz., physical satiety, as the very 
latest thing in ideals. 

Restraint, then! A marriage is doubtless, as 
Chesterton so admirably puts it, a passionate com- 
promise, but it does not follow that love is therefore a 
compromising debauchery. It may be that I, who 
have my ways far from feminine influence, tend to 
place women in a rarer and purer atmosphere than 



AN OCEAN TRAMP i8i 

most of them breathe, and that this tendency unfits 
me for judging them accurately. Let it be so. Let 
my Welsh Divinity watch me from beyond the dust- 
clouds of learning with her grey eyes, while I pray 
never to lose my reverence for the quiet loveliness of 
which she is, so unconsciously, the type. 



XXXV 

Once more I am out at sea. I have stowed away 
my "shore gear," slipped the movable bar across my 
bookshelf, screwed up my windows, and made all 
snug against the wind blowing up-Channel. There 
is a gentle roll; she is in ballast, for the Western 
Ocean, and the Mate does not smile when we discuss 
the probable weather. He would like a little more 
ballast, I know, and he thinks she "draws too much 
forrard." Well, I am minded to go on deck for a 
smoke before I turn in. And the Third Officer is on 
watch, 

I call him the Innovation. There is to be much 
tallying on this charter, and there is a happy rumour 
that the Benvenuto will pay in future, "I hear," 
said my friend the Mate, "I hear, Mr. McAlnwick, 
that she has been reconstructed." By which he 
means that certain financial props have been intro- 
duced into her economy, and she is no longer in 



1 82 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

liquidation. The Mate glories in a four-hour 
watch, and the Innovation takes the eight to twelve. 

He walks across the bridge with a dozen swift 
strides. Then a peculiar slew of his active little 
frame, and he whirls back to starboard. His keen, 
clean-shaven face, hardened prematurely into an 
expression of relentless ferocity, looks out from the 
peak of his badge-cap, the strap cramming the 
crown against his bullet head. He is twenty-two, 
and pure Liverpool. He served his apprenticeship 
in sail on the Australian and Western American 
coasts. A middle-class education is submerged 
beneath seven years at sea, seven years of unbridled 
lust, seven years of the seven deadly sins, seven 
years of joyous and impenitent animalism. 

There is no break in his voice when he speaks of 
"his old lady" — she is religious. His "old man" is 
"a hard case," another name for a Liverpool skipper. 
He met his brother this time at home — "didn't 
know him, mister. Hadn't seen him for six years." 
His knowledge of some things extends from Sydney 
and Melbourne to Marseilles and Hamburg, from 
Amsterdam to Valparaiso; he drinks Irish neat, and 
his conversation is blistered from end to end with 
blasphemous invocations of the name of the Son of 
God. 

I do not overdraw this picture of one who is only a 



AN OCEAN TRAMP 183 

type of thousands. It is impossible to give any 
adequate specification of him. He takes me, meta- 
phorically, by the throat, and I am helpless. With 
vivid strokes he paints me scene after scene, episode 
after episode, of his hfe in "a windbag," and I see 
that he exaggerates not at all. He candidly admits 
that, in his opinion, Marseilles is heaven and Georgia 
the other extreme. He passed for second mate a 
month ago, collected half a dozen shipmates, and 
terminated the orgies in the police-court. 

The psychology of such a soul fascinates me. I 
hold to my cardinal doctrine of the illimitable virtue 
latent in all men; and I am right. The unspeakable 
anathemas he pronounces on a certain skipper, who 
let one of his apprentices die in a West Coast "hos- 
pital," his own terrific descent into the Chilean 
"common grave," groping for the body among the 
rotten corpses, feeling for the poor lad's breast, 
where hung a broken rouble, token of some bygone 
Black Sea passion — all this tells me that I am right. 
Stark materialist though he is, he looks with scared 
awe upon the mysteries of religion, and the denuncia- 
tions of the Dream on Patmos make him hope and 
pray that his own end may come in a deep sleep. 

We are out beyond the Scillies now, and the 
Atlantic stretches before us in a grey, ominous 
immensity. The wind is rising steadily as I turn in, 



1 84 ^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 

and the ship is rolHng deep. The waves loom up, 
white-crested, snap sullenly, and surge away aft. A 
deeper roll, the sea crashes against my ports, and I 
screw them tighter. I think we are to have a bad 
night of it. As I draw my curtain I catch sight of a 
letter on my drawer-top, and I sink back with a 
sigh of content. "A grey eye or so!" 

XXXVI 

I FEEL Strangely to-night, and I cannot sleep. As I 
woke. Six Bells, eleven o'clock, was striking, half 
carried away by the wind. For the storm is rising, 
and a beam sea sends wave after wave against my 
ports. Now and then, in the lulls, I feel the race of 
the propeller as she rises from the water, sending vast 
tremors through the frame of the empty ship. How 
she rolls! In my thwart-ship bunk I slide up and 
down, and the green seas thunder over my head re- 
peatedly. As I turn out I feel excited. North 
Atlantic, light ship. 

The mess-room is silent, dark. To and fro on the 
floor there washes a few inches of water. The stove- 
pipe has been carried away, and the sea has flooded 
the stove. The solid teak door at the top of the 
companion groans as the tons of water are hurled 
against it. The brass lamp gHmmers in the darkness, 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 185 

creaking as it swings. Against the white wall the 
Steward's whiter apron sways hke a ghost, fluttering 
in some eddy of draught. In the tiny pantry the 
cups chnk softly on their hooks. And outside the 
storm-wind whistles in demoniac fury. 

Across the room a narrow slit of light shows 
where the Fourth's room is hooked ajar. I go across 
and peer in. He is on watch, of course, and there is 
no one there. But all round I see httered the belong- 
ings of George's successor. A quiet, hkeable Glas- 
gow laddie, as I know him yet. He has put up his 
bunk curtains, and as they sway I catch a glimpse of 
a portrait. And so.f" Who can blame me if I look 
searchingly into the eyes of the girl with ribbon 
in her hair and a silver cross on her breast.? And 
just beneath the narrow gold frame, swinging on a 
screw, there is a coloured paper design, which I 
know emanates from the Order of the Sacred Heart. 
It is an indulgence for one hundred days, and it has 
been blessed by the Vicar of Christ. Yes, and the 
laddie will have one on his breast, next the skin, as he 
stands by the throttle down below. And when we 
are half a world away from the parish church, he will 
be mindful of the tonsured man who gave him these; 
he will read the little red Prayer Book, and he will be 
ill at ease on Friday when we pass him the salt 
fish. 



1 86 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

Glancing at an old cigar-box full of letters, I go 
out softly and hook the door. 

For all the darkness and the rushing water it is 
close, and I go up and struggle desperately with the 
teak door, biding my time until the waters surge 
back to the rail. The door crashes to again, and I 
struggle on to the poop. To my amazement there 
are men here, four of them at the wheel. And my 
friend the Mate, in oilskins and sou'wester, walking 
back and for'ard. I cry his name, but my voice is 
swept into the void. He sees me, but does not 
speak, only walks to and fro. To me, strung up to a 
tautness of sensation that almost frightens me, this 
silence of the Mate is horrible. I feel a pain in my 
chest like the pressure of a heavy weight as I look at 
him. And the four men toil at the wheel, for the 
steering chains have been carried away. 

Looking for'ard, I see on the well-deck the white 
wreckage of a boat, and I begin to tremble with 
excitement. If the Mate would only speak! A 
thought strikes me — that he will never speak to me 
again; then the sea comes. As she rolls to starboard, 
the great wave lifts his head and springs like a wild 
beast at the rail. A hoarse roar, a rending, splitting 
sound of gear going adrift, and the sea strikes the 
poop with terrific impact. Then the water soughs 
away through the scuppers. And athwart the 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 187 

blackened sky there darts a dazzling flash of light- 
ning. As I hold to my stanchion, soaked to the 
skin, I watch the wrath of God on the face of the 
waters. 

Making a rush, I gain the shelter of the canvas 
screen round the cabin companion, and I bump into 
the Innovation. From beneath the dripping sou'- 
wester his small, keen face peers up at me, and he 
utters his inevitable blasphemy. He hugs his left 
hand to his side. "Mister!" he hisses in my ear, 
"for the love of Christ get me a scarf out o' me berth. 
It's a blue one, in the top drawer." Then, darting 
out for a moment, he yells "Ai!" boiling over into 
asterisks. He darts in again, hugging his hand. My 
foot is in the door, and together we wrench it open. I 
drop down the companion and turn into his berth for 
the scarf. 

It is while coming back that I see into the cabin, 
and I halt. The Skipper is standing under the lamp 
holding out his hand for a cup of coflPee. And 
Nicholas, the fears and imaginings of a volatile race 
blanching his wizened features, rocks unsteadily 
across the floor. The big man with the white hair, 
red face, and cold blue eyes, towers over him, those 
same eyes snapping with something that has nought 
to do with money-making or Brixton, something not 
mentioned in any Board of Trade regulations. 



1 88 AN OCEAN TRAMP 

And Nicholas, holding by the table, looks like a rat 
in a trap, shaking with the fear of sudden death. A 
word from the Skipper, and he turns and runs a 
zig-zag course for the door. He cannot see me in the 
darkness, but I hear him whinnying a song to steady 
his nerves: 

"Ess, a young maid's broken-' earted 
When a ship is outward bound'' 

His face is pinched and drawn, his beady eyes 
move unceasingly, and I think of one who said, "His 
nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'e babbled of green 
fields." 



As I go below to my berth again, striving with the 
door as with a strong man, there crackles and hisses 
a forked glare of lightning, an enormous whip driving 
the great white horses of the sea to madness. On- 
ward they spring, phalanx after phalanx, while above 
the riot of their disintegration glints the faint yellow 
light of Fastnet. Far off to nor'ard, guarding Cape 
Clear, hidden at times by the mountainous water, 
veiled almost to obscurity by the flying spume, it 
flashes, a coastwise light. And on the eastern hori- 
zon — O wondrous sight to me! — the black pall has 
lifted a little from the tumbling waters, leaving a 



^A^ OCEAN TRAMP 189 

band of yellow moonlight with one green-flashing 
star. 

Reaching my berth once more, the terror and 
delight of that last glimpse is upon me. In that 
strange yellow rift at midnight, backing the world of 
dark chaos, that star of palest green, I feel a thrill of 
the superhuman sense which renders Turner inexplic- 
able to Balham, and stabs the soul with demoniac 
joy in the Steersman's Song. 

One Bell, and the pen drops from my fingers. And 
so, until the day break and the shadows flee away, I 
shall be at my post. And in the morning there will 
be more to tell. 



THE END 




THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
GARDEN CITY, H. Y. 



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